Labor, performance, and theatre: Strike culture and the emergence of organized labor in the 1930's

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Content LABOR, PERFORMANCE, AND THEATRE: STRIKE CULTURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE 1930’S by Tiffany Knight Raymond A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Tiffany Knight Raymond ii Epigraph To me a strike bulletin or an impassioned leaflet are of more moment than three hundred prettily and faultlessly written pages about the private woes of a society gigolo. – Jack Conroy, proletarian novelist and editor of the 1930’s literary journal, Anvil iii Dedication To the men and women of Flint, Michigan who risked it all and inspired a nation of workers with their 1936-37 success against General Motors – may they not be forgotten iv Acknowledgements Like any endeavor of great scale, this one was rarely a solo mission. I always had the good fortune to be surrounded by people who truly believed in me and this project and were largely content to hear me passionately rattle on for years about Flint’s sit-down strike of 1936-37, worker-generated theatre of the time, and the reframing of this working class historical event as performance. Academically, I am indebted to Meiling Cheng since it was in her graduate theatre course at the University of Southern California where I wrote a seminar paper that proved to be the seedlings for this project. I also benefited from the wisdom of Joe Boone who first helped me shaped my seminar paper into a prospectus. His astute and detailed marginalia has repeatedly lent polish to my writing. The largest debt of academic gratitude is to my dissertation chair, David Roman. He always had a keenly intuitive ability to provide just what I needed at the appropriate time, whether it was a conference suggestion, deadline reminder, or nudge to keep moving forward. David always campaigned for the value of my project, which doesn’t neatly fit into the traditional boundaries of English department dissertations, and his support helped me believe in myself and keep writing. The majority of my archival research took me to the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and each trip’s findings surpassed my imaginings thanks to the talented archivists there who took an active interest in my project and repeatedly pointed me to sources I would have never found. I enjoyed the camaraderie of Louis Jones and William LeFevre, whose knowledge of v the archives is truly unsurpassed, but he also pointed me to local Detroit dining favorites like the Traffic Jam and Snug, making my trips to the city feel like a welcome homecoming. Of course, academic debts precede my doctoral career at USC. As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to receive a scintillating foundation in English at the University of Arkansas where I benefited from talented and inspiring professors like Joe Candido (who helped me confirm drama was my genre of choice with his London summer theatre program), Larry Guinn, Suzanne MacRae, Susan Marren, and my honors thesis advisor, Dwain Manske. Even at the early stages of my academic career, each of them achieved the rare balance of both challenging and encouraging me. At the University of Tennessee where I received my M.A. in English, professors like Chuck Maland and David Goslee made the scary new world of graduate school a little less frightening and helped me become a graduate-level writer. Beyond the academic, I owe debts to my family and many friends who have supported me. My paternal grandparents, Walter and Irja Knight, always encouraged my inquistive nature and were the bright lights of my youth. I only wish they could be here now; they were brave enough to marry at the peak of the Depression, and the stories they told first seeded my interest in the 1930’s. My in-laws, Rachel and Roy Raymond, and my brother Reed always inquired lovingly about my progress. Above all, I must thank my husband, Aaron. He unfailingly loves me and sustains me and never doubted I would accomplish this goal. His belief and love buoyed me in dark moments of self-doubt, and repaying him for the sacrifices he’s made for me to fulfill my dreams will truly be a lifetime’s happy labor. vi Table of Contents Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Involuntary Actors: Performance Remakes the Industrial Working Body 15 The Working Class Body Performs 50 Chapter 2: Women on the Frontlines 61 The Strike Marches On as It Ceases 94 Chapter 3: Brookwood Labor College: Flint’s Sit-Down Becomes Sit-Down! 115 Brookwood on the March with Sit-Down! 140 Brookwood Beyond the Worker-Student: In Dialogue with Professional Workers’ Theatres 152 A New Kind of History: Workers Record the Sit-Down via Theatre 165 Chapter 4: The Messenger Matters: The Theatre Union as Professional Workers’ Theatre Versus Worker-Generated Dramatics 176 The Theatre Union: History and Innovation 180 Workers’ Theatre: Professional Versus Worker-Generated 198 Bibliography 225 vii Abstract This dissertation focuses on how industrial workers of the late 1930’s used theatre and performance to help achieve collective bargaining and improve working conditions. Organized labor is connected to performance via the sit-down strike, a labor resistance strategy of the late 1930’s in which workers continuously occupied their worksites in a performance of grievance to prevent the importation of scab labor. Serving as the primary case study is the United Automobile Workers’ (UAW) sit- down strike of 1936-37. This strike had nexus in Flint, Michigan and was the first major sit-down and the first to receive national and international news coverage. The UAW’s ultimate, and unanticipated, success over General Motors in early February 1937 spurred an imitative wave of nearly 5,000 sit-downs across the nation that same year. Educational institutions like Brookwood Labor College, which had a student population of workers, theatrically restaged Flint’s sit-down and toured nationally, sharing the autoworkers’ tactics with other laborers and forestalling cultural memory loss of labor struggles. Industrial labor strikes of the Great Depression have been traditionally read through the lens of labor history. Reframing such unmined narratives of working class history as performance and theatre offers an alternate dramatic history for the 1930’s, and more broadly, twentieth century American drama. The UAW sit-down strike of 1936-37 presents a position from which to argue that the sit-down predates, and anticipates, the academic burgeoning of both performance studies and working viii class studies. Worker-driven performances both resonated with, and helped shaped, a larger working class culture. 1 Introduction Performance has broadened in definition with the birth and burgeoning of performance studies, but both the relative youth of the field and the expansiveness of performance still make the field somewhat analogous to the Oklahoma land rush, poised on the verge of possibility with still infinite arrangements, not a decimated, crowded landscape where the building spaces hinge on risky faultlines. One notably open vista ripe for exploration is the pairing of performance and working-class studies, another fledgling field; the two are intertwined to serve as the crux of my dissertation, which explores how performance was integral to the rise of the industrial labor union movement in the late 1930’s. Critics like Harry Elam have admirably and thoughtfully delved into the 1960’s agricultural performances of El Teatro Campesino, and Jan Cohen-Cruz’s anthology coalesces a range of street performances. The open-air venues adopted by El Teatro Campesino and Bread and Puppet Theater have the guarantee of visibility and an instant audience in those gathered who, whether by intention or coincidence, are coaxed or forced into the role of spectators, creating the potential for influence or change through performance. However, open-air performances, be they on the streets or in the fields, are vulnerable by nature of their exposure, which breeds the risk of disciplinary infraction to both participants and spectators as well as the threat of punishment from the powers that be, whether that’s the police or corporate recrimination. It’s hardly an original, or likely even contested, argument that contemporary American drama is granted little attention in twentieth-century American literature 2 courses. If a nod to the genre is given on a syllabus, the text will likely be from one of the canonically established greats: O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee, Shepard or Mamet. This is not to suggest the works of these playwrights are not of great literary value, only that just as students need exposure to poetry outside of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, so too does drama need canonical expansion, by which I mean not just prying open the range of playwrights typically studied but also the types of plays. Early American literature courses are liberally doused with journal fragments, captivity narratives, religious tracts, and legal documents, so there’s no reason contemporary American literature and drama courses should be limited to the conventional. Many of the works discussed in this project are drafts or textual fragments that defy the notion of finality because they were loosely sketched or scripted to encourage performers to improvise their own words based on their actual experiences, largely as members of the working class. Such texts are enhanced by strong historical contextualization because they were generated in response to specific current events. In all likelihood, the works I’m campaigning for will never be syllabi regulars or even eke into an anthology, but a widening of drama’s literary doors might budge open the scope and diversity of what is taught. And I’m certainly not the first to rally for such a move. In The Other American Drama, Marc Robinson notes his boredom with the same repetitive, typical American theatre offerings spurred him to write his book to recover and revive deserving, underacknowledged American playwrights. While Robinson actively rallies for Gertrude Stein, whom he’s clearly passionate about, his feistiness abates the sizzle with the close of that opening chapter. After 3 completing his worthy mission to resuscitate Stein as a dramatist, subsequent chapters on “othered” playwrights like Tennessee Williams hardly seem justifiable when Williams is consistently ranked as top tier. Stein’s unique and original contributions to the dramatic world, which still remain largely unacknowledged, make her a worthy candidate as “other.” For Tennessee Williams, that label is downright puzzling and misplaced, and Robinson’s other chapters on Fornes and Kennedy seem half-hearted to the extent both women have reached a level of prominence that far exceeds Stein. This is not to argue all unknowns or “others” have to rise from an equal level of obscurity, just that Robinson’s choices are clearly out of sync, and the genre of drama is even closer to the sepulcher than we think if Williams ranks as “other.” My dissertation migrates to an industrially-based setting by working inside the framework of the late 1930’s sit-down strike technique. Focusing specifically on the seminal 1936-37 sit-down strike against General Motors by the nascent United Automobile Workers (UAW) allows for a consideration of the sit-down strike methodology as a sustained performance by industrial laborers. In sit-downs, workers enhanced the traditional picket line by filling in the dotted picket line periphery with the performance of sustained worksite occupation, making the workplace a site of occupation. By maintaining continual physical occupation of the factory during the strike, workers multiplied the singularity of worksite functionality into a multivalent site where the daily grind – the performance of one’s assigned labor – became a performance of grievance. The space designed for and defined by production became a new performance space, one of domesticity and negotiation, in the revised business model of performance. The sit-downers’ performance behind plant walls was largely 4 shielded from view by outsiders. Unlike aforementioned open-air counterparts, this invisibility exacerbated the threat and danger associated with such performance because its very invisibility created suspicion about its methods and outcomes, which is also to say its power and ability to influence. The privacy of the sit-down performance was enhanced and extended by another type of performance – performance as a public, alternative media source that transmitted strike strategies and contributed to the growth of national unionization efforts in the late 1930’s, particularly after the autoworkers’ win against General Motors. Theatre disassociated itself from the grandeur of velvet prosceniums and widened to include a profusion of new, often makeshift, stages in strike headquarters and union meeting halls, even inspiring professional workers’ theatres. With limited (or often no) access to traditional media forms, performance became a kind of public access channel on both a local and national level, giving union members and strikers a forum and medium to express what I call the performance of grievance and to coalesce as a community. Union members and hopefuls across the nation were inspired by the success of their predecessor sit-downers, particularly the UAW. Travelling theatre programs like Brookwood Labor College’s annual summer Labor Chautauqua, which I’ll examine in Chapter 3, transported the narrative and strike practices of success stories like the UAW in play format, reaching thousands of workers, unionists, students and citizens each summer. Such plays traced not just the sit-down but also the conditions that led to the strike, and the worker oppression that finally culminated in the strike was something many working class viewers could relate to. For people who weren’t as sympathetic to labor, there was the potential for 5 creating understanding in fleshing out a fuller picture that contextualized what some oversimplified as revolting workers and the threat of Communism. The UAW’s success was imitated on two performance levels: 1.) by other worker collectives staging their own sit-downs to garner rights and 2.) by performances that transmitted the motives and methodologies of the UAW sit-down. Performance was a vehicle to generate confidence and activism through witnessing the performed narrative of others’ successes. This inspired new audiences to stand up and coerce their corner of corporate America into making a companion for Adam Smith’s lone invisible hand that would recognize workers’ rights, collective bargaining, and unionization. Thanks to the outcomes of performance, union badges became a right for employee exhibition, a mini-performance of collectivity, a proud talisman symbolic of the hard- worn union through the efforts of performance. The central focus of this project is to move labor activism and its outgrowths from the more restrictive annals of history to its consideration as working-class performance. Labor history often imitates a Horatio Alger narrative in charting the rise of great men and lofty capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Henry Ford, and even portrays worker advocates like CIO leader, John L. Lewis, as lone helmsmen. But the bulk of labor history, just like the majority of the labor force, is the story of the worker, the drone, the employee, those who are collectively needed to produce the good or execute the service that defines the great man’s career and creates wealth for the upper echelons of management and shareholders. This labor history of the majority is marked by surges in activism and worker protest, and the commonality uniting these performances is that they began in uncertainty. There was 6 no guarantee, no foreknowledge that any performance would end with applause or even recognition or continued employment, and the history of worker performances is blighted with tragic events like Chicago’s Haymarket massacre. Others were ultimately successful, like the emergence and recognition of the United Automobile Workers from the sit-down strike that this work will focus on more fully. These working class protests need to be examined through the lens of performance to revitalize them and reconstruct them with a language that shifts them away from the historical, recognizing the 1930’s as a precursor to performance studies, not limiting the era to an aged set of endangered, decaying documents. History has been written by historians, which is not to trivialize the vitality of that work in any way, only to point out that the space of the sit-down strike is ripe for analysis through the dual lenses of performance and working class studies, which opens labor and extends the existing vocabulary. Today, the concept of performance is inseparable from corporate lingo with phrases like performance review (to evaluate an employee’s work on the job); optimizing performance (to streamline an individual’s or department’s workflow, or the traffic to a website); and key performance indicators (or KPIs) (identifiable benchmarks that allow for gauging performance). With the rise of the internet as a medium for marketing and sales, a website’s performance in internet search rankings is increasingly essential for success and growth, creating the cottage industry of search engine optimization dedicated to increasing algorithmic performance in rankings, thereby guaranteeing more clicks and consequently, more customer conversions, or a higher performance rating for the company. In short, the language 7 of performance permeates today’s corporate atmosphere, suggesting how innate the link between labor and performance has become. We unconsciously think about labor in terms of performance, suggesting the need to expand Richard Schechner’s seven functions of performance to include a measure of labor in terms of employment contribution 1 . The strike I am focusing on in this dissertation is the 44-day sit-down strike by the fledgling United Automobile Workers staged against General Motors that began December 30, 1936 and concluded February 11, 1937. Depression-era images like those by Dorothea Lange that capture the woebegone faces of the unemployed and transient families in rattling jalopies moving towards unknown destinations of greater hope or what Michael Denning calls the “promise of narrative resolution” (qtd. in Casey x). Government-sponsored programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were designed as back to work programs accurately chronicle the period as marked by economic struggle and the strain of prolonged financial uncertainty. The Lange images and programs like the CCC and the rural electrification made possible by the Tennessee Valley Authority represent key components of the 1930’s. However, and less obviously given the decade’s meteoric rise in unemployment, the Depression was also marked by intense labor activism, the rise of which was directly attributable to the sit-down strike. Seeing the Depression as a play between binaries is a common portrayal of the period, and this tendency towards polarity isn’t completely unmeaningful, of course. In the 1970’s, Andrew Bergman staged these binaries as 1 Schechner’s seven functions of performance include 1.) to entertain, 2.) to make something that is beautiful, 3.) to mark or change identity, 4.) to make or foster community, 5.) to heal, 6.) to teach, persuade, or convince and 7.) to deal with the sacred and/or the demonic (Performance Studies 38). 8 escapism versus engagement in his book about 1930’s cinema entitled We’re in the Money, and this formulation remained a dominant binary for the 1930’s. In the 1990’s, prominent critics like Barbara Foley, Alan Wald and Cary Nelson recast the engagement/escapism binary with the new oppositional tension of movement and stasis. In her 2004 work on Depression-era fiction, Janet Casey repeats the movement/stasis binary, and she even makes explicit labor references noting, “Terms such as speed-up, work stoppage, walkout, and strike collectively demonstrate how assertions of movement or nonmovement, action or inaction, became counteractive strategies in a socioeconomic war” (my emphasis, x). In her brief chronicle, Casey includes work stoppage, a lesser version of the sit-down that often implied the threat of an impending sit-down and was typically instigated as a pre-sit-down last resort to offer the company a last chance at a less contentious resolution. Alternately, a work stoppage was a sit-down substitute for the quick resolution of smaller issues, but Casey totally elides the term sit-down, one of the period’s most significant “nonmovements.” Casey raises an interesting set of questions, but I would revise her labor polarities of “movement” and “nonmovement” with a more appropriate descriptor of “movement exchange.” Using the term “nonmovement” to describe a sit-down risks adopting the sanctioned language standards created by corporate hierarchy, given the fact that GM was highly invested in portraying the strikers as lazy, unmotivated workers sans work ethic who were pursuing nothing more serious than a break from labor that they were attempting to publicly legitimize under the guise of union formation. The term “nonmovement” threatens to collude with that inimical corporate 9 tableau. “Movement exchange” is a more accurate description since the labor and movements required to perform one’s assigned job was replaced with the movement of activism. Exchange is also an appropriate term because workers who stayed inside the plants, be it for all or part of the strike’s duration, occupied the same physical space they did during their allotted shifts, and all of the strikers, regardless of where they spent the night, exchanged the shaky security of the intolerable movements bred by the speed-up for the insecurity of the movement of activism where Denning’s “promise of narrative resolution” was not a promise of a guaranteed outcome. Between 1932 and 1938, there were a startling 13,836 labor strikes with 4,740 of them in 1937 alone (qtd. in Fuoss 11). With a labor history legacy of nearly 14,000 labor strikes from which to choose, the decision to focus exclusively on the UAW is just cause for inquiry. The 1936-37 UAW strike was not the first sit-down. In fact, the most significant sit-down preceding the UAW strike was the United Rubber Workers (URW) sit-down against Goodyear in Akron, Ohio from February 18 to March 21, 1936. However, the prima facie statistics point to 1937, not 1936, as the seminal year in strike culture of the Depression, a transformation that is directly attributable to the success of the UAW at the outset of 1937, a strike which began in December 1936 and built on the foundation laid by the rubber workers. The sit-down technique had been used experimentally before 1936 but never with great success. However, the success of the UAW strikers set off a blitzkrieg of sit-downs for the precise reason that the strikers not only opposed General Motors, one of the era’s largest and most powerful corporations, but they were able to maintain a chronic sit-down presence for the duration of the strike. Consequently, they nearly halted General Motors’ national 10 production and ultimately triggered a domino effect of national plant closures. The string of plant closures was driven coterminously by two factors: 1.) a declining reserve of key automobile manufacturing parts produced solely in Michigan and 2.) increasing numbers of plants voluntarily striking for solidarity as the strike progressed and success seemed more plausible, or at least outright failure was a less distinct possibility. Ultimately, and most shockingly, General Motors awarded the strikers nearly everything they asked for. The incredulity of the corporate giant recognizing the workers’ contentions provided the stimulus, encouragement, and model for waves of oppressed workers to stand up for themselves by sitting down. The GM worker was transformed from undistinguished drone fearful of corporate retribution to an emboldened beholder and determiner of his own fate who also became an emblem for others of the potential for labor success. While the UAW strike was the first landslide sit-down success and instigated a flurry of imitators even before its conclusion, the strikers did not begin their sit- down with the luxury of that foreknowledge and the security they were making labor history. In fact, the extremity of the decision to stage this sit-down cannot be taken lightly and was not arrived at casually but culminated from a series of unanswered, or inadequately answered, complaints propelled to action by the national movement towards supporting labor reform. Worker protest is a narrative of collective action motivated by a shared grievance that results in some degree of success or failure, and in the case of the sit-down, an unresolved, unacknowledged, or inadequately resolved issue or series of issues created an impasse that made the sit-down the only feasible performance to garner a concrete response to the crises workers were facing. The 11 culminating sit-down performance was an escalation of a pre-existing performance, the performance of filing repeated complaints that were continually unheeded or inadequately resolved. GM’s policy towards unionization until the sit-down had followed these lines: the company maintained an in-house company union for employee representation, but since it was company-run, it was selectively and minimally responsive to worker complaints. The advantage of the sit-down was that workers continuously occupied the factory. Earlier strikes had been vulnerable because picketing workers could be easily replaced by scab laborers who, while less skilled, could complete the job in some fashion. By the mid-1930s, roughly 20% of all factory work was assembly-line based, and with 55% of the labor force performing semi-skilled labor, three-quarters of the employment positions could be hastily, if poorly, replaced and trained, allowing for the maintenance of partial production or service to prevent the complete bottoming out of the bottomline (Fine 54). Thanks to Depression-era unemployment rates soaring into the 20 th percentile, an abundant scab labor force was available. This eager worker influx and the transformative potential of Lange’s down-trodden to become the self-assured and gainfully employed, was a boon to corporations like General Motors who could bring in scab laborers and if necessary, easily convert them to full-time workers. This new workforce would lack the historically disgruntled memory of the dismissed cadres, and their gratefulness at employment would take time to diminish into discontent and even longer to mutate into any rebellion. Plus, the foreknowledge of replaceability would linger as a nagging, shadowy reminder to quell any desires to make demands or stage strikes. 12 In short, the proverbial cards were in the hands of General Motors, or any company, because the threatening power to dismiss and replace an entire workforce made employees understandably tentative to express discontent, particularly when workers who were perceived ringleaders of activism would often be dismissed as a red flag warning to others who were tempted towards dissention. The battle workers faced was how to get their demands recognized without losing their jobs and being instantaneously replaced and forgotten, making their demands as thin as southern Depression-era topsoil. The sit-down accomplished precisely this through continual occupation. It was a worker solution that maintained corporate attention and forced recognition of a particular set of existing workers. The sit-down trickled down to stop work and stifle production, which proved to be just the bargaining chip that motivated corporate America. The hiring of scab labor meant work continued, so the company wasn’t particularly vested in who was doing it, except for the inconvenience of job retraining, and thanks to the rise of the assembly line, most workers required little to no training. The sit-down forced the company to recognize the workers it had and at least pay heed to their issues, even if no new terms were reached. All of these sit-downs and plant occupations raise the inevitable question of how and who allowed workers to suddenly turn factories into mixed-use spaces that bred the residential, recreational, and recalcitrant atop commercial pilings. On June 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law; the most controversial aspect of this bill was the immediately infamous Section 7(a), which stated employees must be allowed the right to bargain collectively and choose representatives free from employer interference (Fine 28-29). 13 Two years later when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, Roosevelt reparteed the following month on June 28, 1935 by signing the National Labor Relations Bill, which reasserted many of the NIRA’s policies, including collective bargaining, a hands-free employer approach to employee labor organizing, and anti-discrimination policies protecting unionized workers (49-50). The vagaries of a law are still only generalized guarantees without specific protections, but the NIRA and NLRB gave workers something of a promise that more willingly nudged them towards activism without as much fear of retribution. The success of any particular sit-down turned out to rely as much on state politics and legislation as federal guarantees. For instance, Michigan governor Frank Murphy’s opposition to violence, resistance to ousting the sit-downers, and persistant striving towards peaceful resolution largely contributed to the success of the GM strike. Indiana’s more conservative governor, M. Clifford Townsend, aligned himself more closely with corporate interests, ultimately making sit-downs in that state less potent and successful. Governors aside, the sit-down was such a new technique in terms of widespread use, and it rose to prominence and dominance so dizzily that laws had not yet been enacted to anticipate or respond to the particular set of circumstances, creating a legal lull period before the courts hammered out judicial responses. From the rise of sit-downs to Napster, history often leaps forward when the law is nebulous. While the Supreme Court banned the sit-down in 1939, cutting short the strike strategy’s short honeymoon of wild success, a legal loophole had become a galactic blackhole whereby thousands of workers had gained new union 14 and workplace rights, gains that were inextricably linked to performance and which inspired other performances. 15 Chapter 1 Involuntary Actors: Performance Remakes the Industrial Working Body At the conclusion of the 1936-1937 sit-down strike against General Motors, the sit-down strikers poured out of the auto plants they’d been occupying, the crowd growing as the procession started at one plant and moved to ceremoniously vacate two others before marching up Third Avenue through downtown Flint, Michigan. The workers’ 44-day voluntary internment inside General Motors’ plants had ended, and as the strikers marched through town, they paused for a collective, thunderous cheer outside of the Rialto Theatre (Fuoss 73). Proprietor Maxie Gealer was one of Flint’s few businessmen who had supported the strikers, which required openly opposing General Motors, the town’s corporate lifeline. Gealer had donated entertainment, including Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times, to the strikers for two viewings inside the factory during the strike. Gealer’s heroism was undoubtedly heightened even more by his business practices. He not only supported the autoworkers but the unionization of his own employees in the Motion Picture Operators Union, making Gealer a counter to his Flint foil and rival, Lester Matt, moviehouse owner of the Strand who hired scabs during a strike (74). Intentionally or not, Gealer provided more than entertainment, escapism or mere distraction when he took Modern Times, which had been released in February 1936, out of downtown Flint’s Rialto theatre and premiered it inside of union headquarters at Pengelly Hall as well as one of the GM plants on strike. The sit-down 16 was defined by the very act of sustained sitting, or continual occupation of the factory space. Since a population of workers were ballasted to the strike site, be it physical occupation of the plants, marching on picket lines, or union hall strategizing, their territory was circumscribed. Bringing the film to the strikers and altering its viewing location from moviehouse to makeshift theatre, magnified the film’s politics. Even for GM strikers who might have seen Modern Times at Maxie Gealer’s Rialto where the film had enjoyed an extended run earlier in the year, presenting it in the context and setting of the strike encouraged the strikers to explicitly draw a parallel between the work they’d silenced through strike and that of Chaplin’s furiously laboring tramp. Modern Times traces Chaplin’s disenfranchised tramp struggling in the face of various abusive labor practices, including mind-numbing assembly line speed-ups; unemployment; and multiple rounds of institutionalization for everything from a mental health breakdown to legal infractions. Chaplin’s character, named only the “factory worker,” doubled for the striking worker’s body to create a site-specific propaganda of the body for the audience – a reinforcement of the performance of grievance that the workers were engaging in via the sit-down. The performance the worker-strikers communally watched (namely, Chaplin’s factory worker tramp figure struggling to keep up with the pace of his allotted assembly line task of tightening two nuts) was simultaneously a version of a role they’d performed more endlessly than Chaplin’s factory worker. Witnessing a form of their own labor re-presented back to them within the context of the workspace and the larger nest of the strike created a new viewing relationship that moved beyond the sympathetic observer 17 status of spectatorship to an active, participant role that encouraged and reaffirmed the strike’s attempt to disarm and correct the film’s labor horrors that while comedic within the film, were fact, not fiction, for the strikers. Their daily performance of labor was performed back to them as silver screen social commentary via Chaplin and his cinematic assembly line cohorts inside the GM plant next to machinery they’d silenced through sit-down, making Flint’s production as noiseless as Chaplin’s silent film. The strikers had temporarily exchanged the labor of the assembly line for that of sustaining a strike. The film’s workers that “entered” the sit-down space were not scabs storming in to steal jobs, but rather celluloid representations that reaffirmed the essential nature of their struggle. Winning corporate union recognition and employee rights symbolically freed Chaplin’s factory worker whose frenetic workpace mirrored the 24 frame per second filmspeed. More broadly, success in the strike against General Motors provided the seedlings to dismantle the roughshod matrix of corporate greed that made labor abuse and by extension, the representation of Chaplin’s factory worker, possible. There was considerable overlap between the cinematic struggles of Chaplin’s tramp and the eight specific demands General Motors workers were striking for, including regulation of the speed of the line, seniority in rehiring, and the right to union recognition and representation. The film even brushes on a strike scenario where the tramp undecidedly wavers between an allegiance to the company (or at least the financial benefits of continued employment) and adherence to the employee strike culture during a walkout, in which he joins the exiting masses at his supervisor’s behest. The tramp’s frenzied assembly line labor undoubtedly affirmed 18 the sit-down population’s need and purpose in demanding corporate recognition of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as a body to hear grievances and negotiate with GM. Shifting the stage of Modern Times from Gealer’s Rialto to GM plant walls and UAW union halls, which heightened the film’s political valence, would probably have solicited Charlie Chaplin’s chagrin. The February 5, 1936 release of Modern Times was seminal as both Chaplin’s first feature after a five-year moviemaking hiatus and his last silent film; controversy over the film pre and post-dated its repeatedly delayed release as critics and audiences buzzed about Chaplin’s first overt cinematic engagement with social and political issues. Prior to Modern Times, Chaplin had been staunchly committed to film as art and entertainment, not cultural entanglement, seeing the two as necessarily separate if his films were to have broad appeal, so this film countered his own ideology. However, Chaplin’s ideological shift was fitting. The conditions of the Depression both created and demanded greater social awareness from all artists, shifting them away from the more purely aesthetic foundations of the 1920’s. In summer 1935, Boris Skumiatsky, the president of the Soviet motion picture industry, had been shown an early cut of Modern Times by Chaplin, and articles Skumiatsky had published in the Soviet Union, which praised the film as “a sharp satire on the capitalist system in which he decries capitalist rationalization, crisis, the decrepit morality of bourgeois society, prison, and war,” were translated back across the Pacific in the New Masses and created controversy in Hollywood trade journals (qtd. in Maland 146). Chaplin launched an anti-propaganda campaign to downplay 19 charges of capitalist critique, and by extension, suggestions of communist sympathies. Chaplin pushed his critics to focus on the film’s entertainment factor but predictably, interpretive control eluded him, and his critics argued he went too far, or not far enough, and Chaplin’s attempted straddling of a middle line proved too tepid for either side. Film critic John Mosher of The New Yorker summarized the general response in identifying the chasm between Chaplin’s comfort level with his familiar, pratfall tramp of old and a tentative alignment with social conditions or radical politics: “In all, it’s a rambling sketch, a little at loose ends at times, sometimes rather slight in effect, and now and then secure in its rich, old-fashioned funniness” (58). Chaplin readily adopts his familiar portrayal of the tramp with his blindfolded department store rollerskating antics. As Mosher identifies, these moments of confidence (and thereby, success) are in fact “old-fashioned funniness,” earmarking Chaplin as a figure of nostalgia, not progress. Chaplin’s reticence regarding a more socially conscious portrayal of his factory worker tramp ultimately reveals Chaplin’s tentativeness about adopting an assertive position of ideological cinematic risk- taking, even amidst the Depression’s social chaos of strikes and the economics of penury. The most specific name ever given to Chaplin’s tramp character in Modern Times is his opening credit name of “a factory worker.” Although the film’s total running time is 83 minutes, Chaplin’s factory vocation only occupies the first 18 minutes of the film and is the first of five short-lived career paths. After that, he adopts and abandons a battery of professions, including shipyard worker, graveyard security guard at a department store, mechanic’s assistant and cafe waiter. The film 20 credits annihilate any given name to the point that his labor has become his name, suggesting we enter the tramp’s factory labor career not at the outset but in media res. The chosen descriptor of factory worker to define the tramp for the whole of the film suggests one’s labor is written on the body so significantly that even when his body shifts to other labor performances, he is irreversibly steeped as a factory worker. Chaplin’s first task at the shipyard (his first new trade following the factory) is to locate and collect wedges of wood, a chore one might assign a child. It, however, becomes the tramp’s demise when he tugs free a wedge holding a half-built boat and the skeletal ship slips back into the water and sinks, a visible metaphor for the tramp’s inability to thrive in “modern times.” Chaplin’s employment history on the feverishly paced factory line demanded exclusive focus on the object directly in front of him, so he fails to recognize the wedge as interdependent with a larger whole. He simply targets the item he’s been instructed to look for, and what is supposed to be a comic moment in fact reinforces that Chaplin is inescapably “a factory worker.” Chaplin gains his next job, working as a graveyard shift security guard in a department store, the same way he was hired for the shipyard. He shows a letter of support the sheriff wrote for the tramp upon his first release from prison. The letter’s two sentences read, “The bearer is an honest and trustworthy man. Any position given him will be appreciated by. –Yours truly, Sheriff Couler.” In the context of Depression-era unemployment, such a missive proves invaluable in the tramp’s ability to garner work. While the tramp’s trustworthiness is questionable post- shipyard, his honesty remains intact, but both are indicted with his security guard post. His career lasts only one shift due to lack of supervision; in Foucaultian terms, a 21 lack of surveillance creates the potential for disciplinary infraction. Instead of calling the police when a department store break-in occurs, the tramp carouses with the three robbers in an all-night, in-store drinking fest. One of them, Big Bill, turns out to have been the tramp’s neighboring laborer on the assembly line, but even before the realization of their shared labor history, the tramp is intimidated and bullied by the robbers, hardly in security guard mode. Big Bill’s only line of title card dialogue in the film is matter-of-fact, “We ain’t burglars – we’re hungry.” The phrasing points to Bill’s lack of formal education and affirms the link between limited education and low socioeconomic status. Economic desperation, not a criminal mindset, motivated the break-in. Big Bill’s statement of intent offered another self-reflective point of relation for the Flint strikers who faced the daily threat of need surpassing availability in procuring food for themselves and their families. The anxiety of adequate acquisition was exacerbated by threats of delivery cut-offs to the strikers, and on two separate occasions, GM temporarily ordered the cessation of food relief. Consequently, the strikers kept food reserves inside the plant 2 as an insurance policy to allow for the renegotiation of renewed supplies and to prolong forced evacuation. The threat, or the reality, of unsatisfied hunger and the potential for desperation was not circumscribed to the strike scene but was a larger specter of daily life due to seasonal auto industry layoffs. Since rehiring based on seniority was not guaranteed, the long-term certainty of satisfying hunger haunted and eluded the auto workers, making Big Bill’s battlecry 2 Inside Fisher Body 1, the strikers stored a full week’s worth of food, suggesting their acute awareness of the threat of supply shut-offs (Fine 161). 22 of hunger an identification point. The re-presentation of the strikers’ lived experience and the threat of the drastic ends hunger could drive one to (i.e., Big Bill’s department store break-in with his cohorts) affirmed the strike demand for seniority in hiring practices. The strikers were ultimately awarded this demand, which alleviated the anxiety of fulfilling basic necessities, preventing them from becoming Big Bill’s desperate double. General Motors portrayed the strikers as trespassers, classifying them as burglars, like Big Bill, to the extent they were unlawfully occupying private property. Continual occupation of the plants prohibited the importation of scab labor, an action which would have allowed GM to ignore the bids of the strikers since their specific working bodies would become irrelevant with replacement labor, thereby destroying GM’s interest in ending the strike with any concessions for the strikers. The sit-down transformed the labor force from homogeneous individuals who could be replaced at will to individuated bodies that were also a collective force. The strikers’ opposition to scab labor was a larger refusal of the menacing probability of chronic hunger. Big Bill diffuses potentially sympathetic impulses when the four men, including Chaplin’s factory worker tramp, commence with a night of binge drinking, partaking of the department store’s liquor supplies while ignoring the lunch counter food supply that includes cakes visible under domed glass covers. The original intent of food is quickly forgotten with the appearance of alcohol. However, this is perhaps not so surprising given the larger context of the Depression when men more often sought drinking buddies for solace and communal forgetting than eating companions. Historian Robert McElvaine notes that for many Depression-era men “alcohol was a 23 means of escape” (174). In Meridel LeSeuer’s 1939 proletarian novel, The Girl, the main character who is simply called “the girl” – like the tramp’s “factory worker,” another nameless character, bespeaking a parallel between economic hardship and the erasure of identity – observes it’s rarer for men to buy her food than drinks, which she attributes to men not wanting to drink alone, nuancing McElvaine’s claim about alcohol as escape. The quartet of the three robbers and the tramp have a single night in the protected shroud of the empty department store, which becomes a ritualized space of male bonding via alcohol to temporarily forget both hunger and the larger material absences of the outside world. While the department store is well-stocked with an array of liquor, the robbers collectively turn first to champagne. They imbibe the form of alcohol most directly linked to high society, yet they shoot off the top of the bottle as opposed to removing the foil wrapping and popping the cork, simultaneously desiring the emulation and disarming of high society by shooting the proverbial lid off of it. Indulging in champagne, albeit through theft, represents a temporary access point to an unavailable lifestyle they both crave and reject since the mere existence of an upper class means there’s a bottom of the social ladder, which is where all four men reside. As such, the scenario illustrates Marx’s point that “One fact is common to all past ages, the exploitation of one part of society by the other” (103). Escape through alcohol in this scene means performing the rituals of the elite, yet the access point of champagne actually reproduces Marx’s exploitation by a fantasy exchange of socioeconomic status. More broadly, the department store setting reproduces consumer excess since items are available in multiple, identical versions, produced 24 by, but not affordable for, assembly line workers like the tramp and Big Bill. This scene of debauchery is an attempt to forget alienation by relishing in the material goods that allow for it. The revelry also undoubtedly helps explains why alcohol was forbidden on the sit-down strike site. Strike leaders were conscious of the strike’s vulnerability to outside authority, be it court rulings or ammunition for GM to stop the strike, so a strict ban on alcohol subtracted one point of susceptibility. GM could not accurately portray the strikers as drunken, bacchic revelers substituting real work with chronic inebriation. While Big Bill and his cohorts damage department store property in their drunkenness, starting with the bottle opening bullet, the safe maintenance of plant equipment was tantamount for the strikers. By occupying the plants and not damaging company machinery, the strikers minimized the risk of attack by GM; the cost-benefit ratio of destroying their investments in machinery was not worth ousting the strikers. Even without strikers in delirium tremens, GM was quick to label the workers as lazy and characterize their motivation as indolence, a false charge considering the risk of permanent job loss and the temporary lack of income due to the strike. In the film, Chaplin’s one-night stand as a security guard ends with him passing out under a pile of fabric, where he’s discovered during business hours the next morning. Jeopardizing the strike’s success for the temporary pleasure of imbibing alcohol was a warning for the film’s factory viewing population, particularly since Chaplin’s foible is compensated by a second jail term of 10 days. The strikers had to maintain vigilant, disciplined order to avoid potentially disruptive performances that could risk terminating the strike. To execute this resolve, many plants instigated “kangaroo courts” where offenders were “tried” by group of peers, 25 typically a population of older, wiser employees who sentenced wrongdoers to a variety of remunerations from sacrificing cigarettes to clean-up patrol (Fuoss 53-54). The title card introducing the scene in which the tramp learns of his release from his first incarceration reads “Happy in his comfortable cell.” Chaplin lounges on his cell bunk in a position of classic repose, his right arm tucked behind his head as a pillow. His left hand holds up a daily newspaper with blaring headlines about labor unrest, unemployment and breadlines. In the reaction shot, Chaplin shrugs disinterestedly and turns the page, suggesting the rapidity of the shift to indifference when economic struggles are no longer personal. While economic instability fuels strike motivation, a few creature comforts, even in the context of prison, quickly ameliorate discontent. When the General Motors strike spread to Flint, Michigan on December 30, 1936, the company immediately baited workers back to work by pointing out they’d miss their year-end bonus, a timely action designed to emphasize GM’s generosity in the public eye and divide the strikers with a veiled threat regarding the high stakes strike consequence of poverty. The year-end bonus as dangling carrot had a largely inverse effect, thanks to the union’s counterpropaganda that swelled worker indignation by drawing attention to the blatancy of GM’s methodology that assumed worker’s historical memory of injustice could be so easily swayed. It affirmed accepting such a bonus was in fact a bribe that condoned the continuation of substandard treatment, and GM’s bonus reminders failed to break the strike. Union rhetoric about the necessity for solidarity was instrumental from the beginning in fostering worker commitment and aligning the strikers ideologically. In 26 fact, while the sit-downers were not without creature comforts, the contentment and disengagement Chaplin’s prisoner so quickly finds was never available to the strikers due to the sustained uncertainty of the success of their mission. Chaplin’s incarcerated factory worker quickly familiarizes himself with the daily regimentation of prison life where a release date is typically fixed, a counter to the never-set variability of the sit-down’s evacuation date. The sit-down space of the plants was continually vulnerable to outside forces, from the threat of expulsion to direct attack, which is why strikers assigned to security performed rounds on a rigorous 24-hour schedule, mimicking the timed regimentation of prison life. The strike’s termination date, unlike the pre-known release date of a prison sentence, was a continual push- pull between GM’s campaign for immediate cessation and the strikers’ persistent and willful plant occupation until the UAW was recognized as the strikers’ negotiating organization, the strikers’ most salient demand and one that was ultimately met. Prison is the first domestic space we see Chaplin’s factory worker occupy, and he quickly personalizes his space, creating warmth within prison walls. The camera pans out within his cell to reveal decorations dotting the wall. Blocky cross-stitched letters proclaiming “Home Sweet Home” are hugged by a frame, and this platitude shares wall space with a picture of Lincoln and another of a boxer – two photographic links to the larger home of America. These images suggest not sweetness, but the battleground nature of American culture; “Home Sweet Home” is a space achieved through contestation, be it the Civil War and Lincoln’s belief in freeing the slaves or the boxer’s pugilism to defend a title. These two images suggest home is inextricably linked to power exerted to counter injustice, a sentiment that would have resonated 27 with the strikers who personalized their temporary domestic space of the factory with family photos. The sit-down fight offered yet another dueling of viewpoints in the larger continuum of American history. Lincoln as a leader and the boxer as a fighter represent two figures who defend themselves, be it for ideals or to maintain a title. These selected icons mirror the tramp’s own battle as he attempted to clarify the truth before his arrest; he protests to the police that he was simply trying to wave down a truck driver whose red flag had dropped from his lumber load, not lead a Communist demonstration. The officer’s desire to cripple Communist growth and regularize democracy overrides the falsity of the tramp’s arrest. In fact, Chaplin’s factory worker is far less ideologically radical than any Communist party agenda. In a scene with co-star Paulette Goddard’s character of the orphaned gamin, the tramp fantasizes about their sharing a suburban bungalow with excessive food and flowered drapes, not leadership positions or government overthrow. His goals are middle-class comfort, and the regularized eating schedule and decorative touches of prison make it a suitable substitute for the tramp’s American dream. Unfortunately, this version of the American dream is all too short- lived for the tramp. The “Home Sweet Home” sign becomes ironically irrelevant within minutes when the apparent permanence suggested by home décor is involuntarily stripped away with the tramp’s release from jail. The tramp’s plea to stay in prison is read in jest by the sheriff, making the tramp’s cross-stitched signage the next prisoner’s welcome mat. The prison’s full occupancy suggests another inmate will immediately occupy the tramp’s vacated bunk. Much like the tramp’s 28 space on the assembly line, he’s just as replaceable as a prisoner as he was as a factory worker. At the conclusion of the General Motors strike on February 11, 1937, nearly 800 workers ceremoniously marched out of three different plants; some of these workers had continually occupied the plants since the strike’s incarnation on December 30 th . Most had come in and out, balancing sit-down duty in the plants with marching on a traditional picket line, gathering strike resources and participating in meetings at Pengelly Hall’s union headquarters. The sudden departure on February 11 th after a prolonged occupation that was never defined by a determinate length was bittersweet for many of the strikers who had adopted the plants and its all-male community as home. Like Chaplin’s factory worker, the strikers did not want to leave the “Home Sweet Home” they’d created within a new context, and also like the tramp, their willingness to stay did not alter their departure date. Unlike the tramp, the strikers had homes to return to, and many had wives and children, but the presence of a world to return to did not fully counter the sadness of disjointing a new familial structure. Domesticity was encouraged during the strike by the strike committee’s organization of the strikers into 6-10 man “family units” (Fuoss 110), which created work teams for assigned group tasks like security or clean-up, but also replicated a familial structure, organized the men, and established accountability, making it tougher for potentially or temporarily disenchanted strikers to disappear. The family unit set-up encouraged dialogue, community and interdependence. Genuine friendships grew from forced proximity and shared conflict, and one striker wrote to his wife “We are a happy family now” (qtd. in Fuoss 110) suggesting the extent to 29 which adaptation and redefinition marked the strike space. The circumscribed, regulated workzone for workers, the decibel level on the factory floor, and the sheer speed of the line had foreclosed on free time and inhibited conversation and consequently, delayed unionization, on a daily basis. While General Motors had sponsored outside activities, many workers who labored in the same factory and even in fairly close proximity, like Big Bill and the tramp, did not get to know each other until the strike created an atmosphere of camaraderie. Another striker wrote that he and his family unit had “managed to create a home out of a factory” (qtd. in Fuoss 110). Like Chaplin’s tramp, many of the strikers had decorated the areas around their makeshift beds with photos of loved ones and letters from them. Removing these images from the plant walls that had become “Home Sweet Home” forced the realization of the strike’s termination, even if victory had been achieved. A letter written by one of the sit-downers on the day the strikers exited the plants said, “One must pack. Into a paper shopping bag I place the things which helped make my ‘house’ a place to live in: house slippers, extra shirts, sox [sic] and underwear; razor and shaving equipment; two books, a reading lamp, and the picture of my wife that hung above my bed” (qtd. in Fuoss 110). The dissolution of any community marks change, and the reference to the plant as a “house” links the hominess of the factory to the catalog of objects that occupied it. Slippers once nestled under nightstands and shaving equipment that lounged on bathroom counters entered the plants and forced a redefinition of space as the domestic ritual of shaving melded with the plant space, formerly a site defined exclusively by work. Activities once separated by location united to unwittingly 30 reconceptualize and multiply traditional spatial identities. Just as the showing of Modern Times within the factory transformed the plant into a theatre, the relocation of the slippers and shaving accoutrements marked the transformation of the plant into a home. This fluidity of space humanized the plant and for the first time, the workers felt in control of as opposed to controlled by their space. The note of sadness in packing the “paper shopping bag” of goods undoubtedly reflects a sadness shared by many strikers who feared a “return to normalcy,” something touted in the Harding administration but feared by the 1930’s simply because a “return to normalcy” meant living with the dehumanization of breakneck assembly line speeds the workers didn’t have a voice in regulating and a blatant disregard for the worker as an individual. The fear of the ordinariness of everyday life might have been a palpable fear; even if a striker had not been singled out as a news item (and many had, thanks to Henry Kraus’ Flint Auto Worker newspaper, which tracked strike events from the workers’ point of view), the strike’s success bestowed an intensified recognition of self-worth. After all, national and even international newspapers had sent labor journalists to report on the strike, and the achievements of union victory meant a step away from what had evolved into a long-term spotlight. Chaplin unwittingly becomes the model prisoner after accidentally forestalling a prison break, but his reward of an early release leaves him vulnerable to a world where he once again blends with the droves of the unemployed. Professionally, the tramp is most comfortable as a prisoner; the regimentation of prison life mimics life on the assembly line sans stress. In fact, when the prison 31 official tells Chaplin he’s going to be released from his first incarceration and is a “free man,” the tramp immediately begs, “Can’t I stay a little longer? I’m so happy here.” The tramp’s question is humorous to the extent prison is undesirable precisely because one isn’t “free” and shouldn’t be “happy.” In the film’s “modern times,” mimetic of Depression-era living, institutionalization ironically proves to be the version of freedom with the most creature comforts and consistent socialization. In the outside world, the tramp is a simulacrum of the individual’s vulnerability to starvation, exploitation, alienation, poverty, and economic depression. The sentiment of prison as paradoxical oasis wasn’t limited to Chaplin’s comedy. In the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad arrives home from prison only to find his family barred from their land and leaving for California, victims of foreclosure. Tom straightforwardly describes prison as “You eat regular, an’ get clean clothes, and there’s places to take a bath. It’s pretty nice some ways” (Steinbeck 22). His commentary provides a stark contrast to the hardscrabble conditions the Joad family faces on their cross-country journey as they set out with more uncertainty than money or food resources. Socialization, and its inhibitions, was also one of the touchstones of the 1936- 37 sit-down strike. One of the challenges of organizing industrial laborers was that the constant roar of machinery inhibited conversation, so even workers in close proximity did not know each other and therefore, were understandably wary about joining an organization of strangers, despite being yoked together by the common bond of assembly line work. The tramp clearly gets to know Big Bill more in the space of one night of department store debauchery than he did in their time together 32 serving next to each other on the line. In fact, the tramp’s continual struggle to keep up with the speed of the line and his chronic game of catch up quickly flares to a point of contention for Bill whose own labor is thrown off by the tramp’s failings. Prison becomes a space of recuperation that parallels the tramp’s earlier visit to a hospital after his nervous breakdown on the assembly line. Thanks to the tramp’s accidental forestalling of a prison break and perceived honesty, his life behind bars exceeds that of the average prisoner. In fact, when he’s summoned to learn of his release, the camera pans back, exiting the cell, and we see the camera could back out of the door as easily as the prisoner – the cell door is already wide open; in fact, one of the guards is sitting inside socializing with the tramp. For Foucault, prison is a space of surveillance and control where the subject internalizes power relations. For Chaplin’s tramp, prison is a space of freedom and a welcome relief from the anxieties of meeting one’s own daily needs. The tramp’s easy-going spirit in prison is an ironic contrast to his struggles on the assembly line and reverses expectations about expected oppressions. Prison turns out to be a more habitable and desirable space than the work environment of the factory. The strikers felt terrorized on the job, and the self-imposed prison of the sit- down plant offered a greater space of freedom than the high pressure, routinized, regulated plant as worksite. One fifty-five-year-old worker “testified that the only difference he could discern between a penitentiary and the GM plant in which he worked was that the GM worker could go home at night. ‘It is cruel; it is absolute cruelty.’” (Fine 56). The 55-year old worker’s testimonial was a truism for all GM workers; the plant was prison-like because voicings of worker discontent were not 33 accounted for in determining the speed of the line. The adopted “prison” of the plant was a voluntary space of inhabitation, and cruelty was erased because the men were controlling their labor, not being controlled. The prison’s oppression comes from the fact the prisoner lacks volition, and all of his movements are monitored, controlled, and watched in a classic panopticon setting, making Chaplin’s prisoner a unique exception. As long as the prisoner behaves within the parameters of prescribed rules, he should not be subject to disciplinary infraction, but unsanctioned behavior that deviates from the norm results in punishment. This was much the same for the GM laborer who had no voice in setting the pace of his work, which was monitored by foremen acting under orders from the GM corporate office, and was not subject to change or negotiation, regardless of how widespread dissatisfaction was. Chaplin’s tramp halts production when he descends into the bowels of the machine pursuing untightened nuts; on the line, it is only a failure to comply with established rules that results in unfavorable attention. However, the factory worker tramp isn’t necessarily any more individualized in prison than he is on the line. The film traces the lead up to the tramp learning of his release when the sheriff phones another prison official and commands, “Bring number seven here!” The tramp remains a number; his good deeds have not earned him a name. He has simply exchanged one number for another, having gone from being part of “section five” on the assembly line to “number seven” in prison. In both instances, his powerlessness as a subject is highlighted via the effects on his body created by the whims of others, whether it’s an unwanted release from jail that forecasts hunger and homelessness or his attempt to compensate for increased line 34 speeds by moving his body more rapidly. In this case, the sheriff orders a guard to bring the tramp “here,” suggesting the centralization of power as the man who answers the phone clearly knows the source and location of the voice on the dialing end. Power nests in remote locations, whether it’s the President of Electro-Steel calling down from his office to speed up the line after glancing at Big Bill and the tramp in his monitor or the hierarchy of prison officials. One prison administrator shepherds the tramp prisoner to a centralized location while another of higher status, the sheriff, confers the news of release. In prison, the tramp is dry, sheltered, and eats on a predictable, routine schedule, which is more than he can guarantee in his daily life outside of prison walls where he’s subject to the whims of the climate, shelter is a daily gamble, and the source of his next meal is a perpetual question mark. In fact, Chaplin’s social commentary that he as an auteur wanted to disavow hardly rings more dynamically than in these prison sections where it’s hard not to question social conditions that make prison more desirable location than the outside world. Like Chaplin’s incarcerated tramp, the sit-downers were also guaranteed a regularized eating schedule. They undoubtedly benefited from more hearty meals than they were used to outside of plant walls; a typical breakfast consisted of “eggs, fruit, cereal, fried cakes, and coffee” (Fine 161). Not only was food plentiful but routinized mealtimes contributed to creating community, and sharing all three meals was another way of redefining the plant’s workspace as a homesite. With the appearance of slippers, sleeping areas and food, the factory’s definitional space use multiplied and proved adaptable for performing the tasks of daily living. Just as theatre doesn’t need a proscenium, so the performance of daily life transpired in 35 repurposed shelter. Dorothy Kraus, wife of Henry Kraus who was editor of the Flint Auto Worker, chaired the UAW food committee, and Max Gazan, a former chef for the elite Detroit Athletic Club, headed the strike kitchen. Despite working in a posh kitchen serving Detroit’s elite, Gazan’s sympathies were clearly worker-aligned since before he came to Flint he had already cooked for a shorter December sit-down in Detroit. His organizational experience with large-scale cooking and strike feeding were essential since up to two thousand strikers were fed three meals a day. On a typical day, the UAW kitchen used “five hundred pounds of meat, one hundred pounds of potatoes, three hundred loaves of bread, two hundred pounds of sugar, and thirty gallons of fresh milk” (Fine 161). Supplying food for a single day, let alone the 44 day internment of the strike, proved challenging as the strike committee continually sought donations and discounted purchases. Food and machines intersect in Modern Times’ infamous Bellows Feeding Machine scene. In a world tour Chaplin took in 1931, he had defended machines to Gandhi “as a way to provide modern man with more leisure” (Maland 130). Yet, in the context of the film, machines promise not to supply men with more leisure time but corporations with more profit potential. The feeding machine’s goal is to eliminate lunch breaks by automatically feeding still-laboring employees, thus eliminating bottom line inefficiencies. As the machine hilariously malfunctions on its guinea pig victim of Chaplin’s factory worker throwing soup in his face and slapping him repeatedly with a half-eaten cob of corn, the encroachment of the machine represents a source of humiliation, not leisure. However, if modern times and the machine age promise the “modern man” more free time, the pressbook originally 36 distributed with Modern Times was attuned to attracting viewers to spend this leisure time in the theatre. The book offered theatre owners six marketing ideas to promote the film, and the second was to “Put a false cardboard factory front on the theater” (Maland 147). The marketing proposal to transform the theater into a factory is particularly ironic as the desired by-product of more leisure is undoubtedly not to spend it entering reconstructed factory spaces. But reconstructing the moviehouse as a factory anticipates the slippage from theater to actual factory in the context of the GM strike. In fact, Maxie Gealer’s idea to bring the film to the strikers could have well originated with this suggestion about the transformation of space. The marketing campaign to transform theatre to factory, while novel, also announced a larger transformation – the industrial, socially conscious makeover of the notoriously apolitical Chaplin. The idea of the “false front” itself suggests the differential between what we see and what we get; while Chaplin may promote the film as pure entertainment, that’s a false front to the extent the film questions the naturalization of dehumanizing labor practices. The “false front” is also true for industrial laborers – a job that transforms workers, including the factory worker tramp, into interchangeable machine parts doesn’t truly allow for the benefits of enjoying leisure time when the reality of one’s replaceability threatens any sense of longterm economic stability. Revealing the reality behind “false fronts” was one of the striker’s goals from the outset. After all, from the vantage point of the corporate office and public perception, General Motors was pleasing both shareholders and employees. In 1936, the company was ennobled with the title of “colossal” by Fortune magazine when GM was lauded for representing 37 percent of the entire world’s vehicle sales and an 37 annual gross profit of $163 million. The company’s total assets exceeded $1.5 billion, and GM boasted sixty-nine automotive plants spread across thirty-five cities and spanning fourteen states (Fine 21-22). On paper, GM’s employee relations looked equally dazzling as the average hourly employee worked 40.5 hours per week and earned an average of 75.6 cents an hour, well over the 55.6 cent average for other manufacturing laborers (Fine 21-22). However, widespread employee discontent suggests a significant chasm between the glossy world of General Motors on the pages of Fortune and the practical reality of being part of the GM employee family. Such staggering statistics for 1936 only seemed to point skyward to GM’s continued domination of the automotive industry, but clearly, there was an underbelly to GM’s seemingly unstoppable domination when the same year ended with Flint’s two Fisher Body plants solidifying the larger sit-down strike against GM that had originated in Atlanta’s Fisher Body plant on November 18, and GM’s ebbing production dipped with Michigan’s winter temperatures. General Motors claimed its in-house company-run unions were sufficient for addressing worker needs and grievances, but the reality is that a grievance hierarchy was unclear. Workers who complained were told that production speeds and regulations were determined by corporate headquarters and were not at the discretion of the individual plants, allowing individual plants to create their own “false front” – a frustrated desire for benevolence and compassion prohibited by dictatorial corporate edicts. Many workers did claim GM’s in-house company unions were adequate grievance outlets. Actual satisfaction rates are difficult to assess since workers whose jobs were threatened before the strike, those who might have witnessed earlier labor 38 organizing efforts fail, and those would be out of work due to the strike were undoubtedly hesitant to confess workplace dissatisfaction due to fears of repercussion and the desire to maintain or regain employment that however grueling, provided something for them and their families. What is clear is that GM repeatedly drew attention to the absence of a united front among workers during the strike and promoted dissention over the strike through the portion of the workforce that claimed the company union adequately addressed complaints. This created a vulnerability point for the strikers since GM added another layer to their “false front” by feigning confusion over the strike’s origins by pointing at contented workers. However, GM recognized that widespread worker discontent had reached a threshold, and while they would not publicly admit it, they were already directly responsive to labor organizing and had increased benefits and compensation immediately prior to the strike. In fact, these new initiatives mirrored some of the concessions won by Detroit’s Midland Steel – a producer of steel body frames for Chrysler and Ford – where a strike had frozen production from November 27 to December 4, 1936. Midland Steel represented a union victory, and two of the four concessions they won involved overtime and wage increases (Fine 129-30). In response, General Motors both raised wages and decreased the number of hours needed for overtime. These new measures suggest GM was responding with policy changes pre-UAW recognition and that workers were benefiting from the unionization of their cohorts. If anything, this might have given the Flint workers the initiative they needed to instigate, not delay, their strike, especially after seeing the fledgling UAW support the Midland strikers. GM concessions were also no doubt 39 driven by the fact the Midland strike originated with 1,200 strikers; in the course of the 8-day strike, that number swelled to 53,000 either voluntarily as a show of solidarity or due to layoffs thanks to part shortages (129). The fall of a pivotal plant like Midland proved to have a detrimentally devastating domino effect on manufacturing, a fate GM wanted to avoid. Ellen Wilkinson, a member of British Parliament’s Labor Party, was a celebrated strike supporter who came to Flint and was quoted as saying, “This is the revenge of the man they tried to turn into a cog” (Vorse 3). In Modern Times, Chaplin’s factory worker toils at the Electro Steel Corp; as a nut tightener, he holds one oversized wrench in each hand, raising and lowering his forearms in synchrony to tighten two nuts protruding from a rectangular piece of steel. These identical steel plates relentlessly pass before him on a conveyor belt as nondescript, indistinguishable components, which Chaplin’s factory worker tightens, prepping them for attachment to what we imagine might be some larger object further down the line. But these steel rafts remain isolated islands, and while Chaplin as a director pans the factory to show multitudes of factory workers conjoined by the assembly line and laboring at sundry microtasks, he never reveals the larger finished product or products these pieces interface with, heightening his factory worker’s alienation through a circumscribed vision where speed creates alienation by failing to allow for the recognition of how one’s labor integrates beyond the repetitive task always immediately present. Marx argues that “Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and 40 consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him” (87). Chaplin’s employment as a nut tightener requires no specialized knowledge and mere minutes of training, making Chaplin’s factory worker as interchangeable as any of the nuts he endlessly tightens. A viewer watching Chaplin’s factory worker quickly feels sympathetic exhaustion for the numbing redundancy of his task. This undoubtedly rang true for the sit-downers who wanted a voice in determining the pace of their labor so they wouldn’t just be a frenzied blur of moving limbs. Marx fails to account for a second level of alienation created by the highly individuated division of labor and exacerbated by the speed of the line, which is the alienation of the factory worker from his fellow workers since accelerated line speeds don’t permit communication or building relationships with co-workers, even those in closest proximity. The labor space zone required to accommodate each worker and his task set maintains enough space between workers to prohibit conversation. One reason Chaplin may have chosen to make Modern Times as a silent film is that transforming it into a “talkie” with the blend of comedy and verisimilitude Chaplin sought would have introduced a roar of machinery so loud it would drown out the possibility for conversation, a reality workers faced every day in assembly line labor. The “talk” would have been that of industrial machinery, not workers engaged in dialogue. The same labor which retards individuality through subservience to a domineering line also heightens one’s alienation due to lack of communication. Within a few cycles of his labor, Chaplin transforms from an individual who punches 41 in and walks jauntily past the timeclock to the cog Wilkinson cited the strikers as having become. Within the context of General Motors, the isolation created by chronic worksite clamor inhibited trust among workers; gaining worker confidence was one battle union organizers confronted as they attempted to initiate the fledgling United Automobile Workers’ union. General Motors, while claiming to adequately represent workers through its in-house company union, clearly had concerns about start-up, in house labor organizing, even when the movement was in its infancy and workplace conditions mitigated against such organizing. Industrial labor espionage occurred minimally pre-1933, but the passage of Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in June 1933 with its corporate-feared section 7(a) that federally guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining inspired a rise in internal corporate spying. In fact, General Motors became the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s largest industrial client; in the span of two and a half years (between New Year’s Day 1934 and July 31, 1936), GM spent approximately $1 million on labor espionage. But the Pinkerton’s weren’t the only GM watchdogs; from 1933 to 1936, GM also employed 13 other detective agencies (Fine 38). This meant operatives from competing agencies were unknown to each other, creating a cross-hatched network of spies reporting on spies with GM as the corporate cardholder to the spy identity answer key. These layers of reinforcement also meant any worker agents who developed actual labor sympathies would be quickly sussed out, and even if the union uncovered one network of spies, overall espionage was still in effect. By working to infiltrate the labor movement, the spy system undoubtedly bolstered the union’s apparent 42 membership and created word of mouth for the union as operatives promoted the union to earmark susceptible or interested workers. More significantly, an air of union activity suggested the need for unionization, a movement rooted in worker malcontent, meaning the detectives helped GM workers accelerate the conscious recognition and vocalization of their dissatisfaction. With as many as 200 spies reporting on union activities across GM plants at the peak of labor espionage, corporate paranoia surpassed the pandemic when GM feared spies were betraying trade secrets to auto industry competitors. Consequently, they hired operatives to watch the operatives, creating a contorted spiral of espionage (Fine 38). The widespread knowledge among employees that agents masqueraded as workers made it nearly impossible to determine whom one could trust, particularly in a work environment where regimentation and noise made developing bonds between employees nearly impossible. Worker agents would attempt to ingratiate themselves into the organic labor organizing movement on the plant level, often rising to positions of union leadership to gain trust and solidify their position as information conduits to the GM corporate office while undermining the growth or success of the union through everything from lack of discretion to calling premature strikes (Fine 39). With detectives disguised as GM employees, separating the sincere from the specious meant all labor organizers were under suspicion as stool pigeons since there was no way to read the body that would guarantee an accurate answer. Performance in this context was unreliable since agents worked on the line and performed authentically as union promoters, walking the line between nominally advancing the 43 labor movement and not being too obvious about pumping fellow workers for information. Marvin Carlson argues, “Performance is really framed and judged by its observers,” which put actual GM employees in the role of observer spies looking for signs of infidelity that could betray a union official as a potential saboteur (5). Workers who adopted union doctrines put their employment, and more broadly, their families, at risk through potential and permanent job loss. General Motors remained intolerant of union organizing or any efforts that might curb corporate power. Since auto industry employment was rarely year-round, multiple rounds of layoffs and rehiring were conducive to GM using its insider knowledge base to discriminate against union members without corporate repercussion, particularly since rehiring was not based on seniority pre-UAW. The fact General Motors devoted such tremendous resources to infiltrating the labor movement suggests the company’s acute awareness of both the viability and potential danger of a successful labor culture. More broadly, the cost/benefit ratio workers risked in attempting to unionize suggests GM was aware of how deeply dissatisfied its employees were. Clearly, GM’s rhetoric of employee family values in the pages of Fortune was more façade than substance. GM’s vast resource availability – spending a million dollars on espionage in a 30-month period in 1934-36 – magnifies the shock-factor of any autoworker triumph. The UAW formed and ultimately succeeded under circumstances that conspired against it ever achieving any degree of success. In Modern Times, the oversized wrenches weigh down Chaplin’s factory worker, and even a momentary pause to satisfy personal needs is punishable by 44 working doubletime to compensate for the labor that zooms past him on the line. Chaplin’s tramp pauses momentarily to scratch his right armpit, never releasing his weighty wrenches in a literal balancing of the tension between the demands of labor and those of the body. This moment of inattention to satisfy scratching, an action so minute and unmemorable it would never stand out in the consciousness of daily life, comes with high stakes consequences thanks to the demands of the assembly line’s conveyor belt that fails to individuate or respond to individual needs. Chaplin’s factory worker has to scamper down the line and perform a frenzied doubletime labor to compensate for the work that passed him in the space of the scratch; he has to rush to catch up and edge back up the line to his designated spot. His scratching has a ripple effect on those whose labor post-dates his on the line; most directly affected is the tramp’s assembly line neighbor, Big Bill, who lacks the tools to complete Chaplin’s task, so the scratch hinders completion of his allotted task until Chaplin’s factory worker tightens the two required nuts. Instrument distribution on the line guarantees each worker has to complete his own task, another way for management to pinpoint sources of failure. Also, Chaplin’s movement down the line to attend to the escaped nuts encroaches on Bill’s designated personal space for labor on the line. The assembly line as a moving entity depends on the relatively static placement of workers; disrupting this logic has the potential for disastrous consequences as workers could pile onto each other in a compressed workspace. The foreman immediately responds to the tramp’s momentary lapse in labor and attempts to forestall future or additional crisis by coming over to reprimand the tramp for falling behind. The scratch, an innocent, momentary action, becomes a 45 point of contestation. As Chaplin attempts to balance explaining his side of the narrative to refute the foreman’s charges with the continued demand to tighten nuts, his factory worker character again loses focus thanks to his divided attention and momentarily falls behind. Chaplin’s factory worker’s desire to face the foreman in conversation as opposed to having the foreman lecture the tramp from the side supersedes the tramp’s ability to maintain a frontal commitment to his work as he veers from a forward focus on the steel plates rolling before him. When Chaplin’s factory worker falls behind during the reprimand, the foreman positions himself in front of Chaplin’s designated spot on the line and incessantly taps with a pointed finger at an invisibly marked spot on the side of the conveyor belt line that designates the tramp’s fixed work position. The tramp urgently works at a double-time pace, the pace of his hands mirroring those of the frantically rapping foreman, and Chaplin’s factory worker creeps back up the line to the unmarked place that represents his required base of operations and range of motions. The foreman’s urgent gesticulating suggests the strict boundaries the body must operate under to obey and succeed. While the silent film doesn’t allow us access to the dialogue between supervisor and laborer, the foreman’s agitated, exaggerated gestures suggest a tone antithetical to understanding that disavows the space of dispute. The foreman’s gestures almost require exaggeration since on the raucous factory floor, his words would be inaudible to a larger audience. However, his urgent, angry gestures have wider borders of visibility, making his actual words subservient to the demonstration of the larger lesson to fellow employees. In fact, the foreman must maintain the discipline of the line and bend workers to the demands of the conveyor belt’s 46 presentation of work in order to maintain steady production. It is only in failure that a worker is noted, and the foreman’s responsiveness and attempt to normalize the factory worker tramp’s deviations suggest worker invisibility is the desired outcome. Only when all workers follow the company-established rules can corporate success flourish, which is precisely why disobedient bodies must be rigorously disciplined. Any unrebuked deviance carries the potential seed of revolutionary potential. By publicly reprimanding Chaplin’s factory worker, the foreman simultaneously champions the denial of the human body necessary for work on the line and curbs potential insubordination from neighboring workers by making punishment visible, taking us back to Foucault’s arguments about discipline. General Motors was omnipresent, utilizing both external and internal forms of power and punishment. The visible punishment of public reprimand and angry gesticulation seen on the plant floor in Chaplin’s Modern Times offered another moment of relation for the Flint striker-workers who were familiar with such routines, especially since employees with known union sympathies were often publicly fired for an infraction of a frequently broken rule. Foucault links external punishment to the Renaissance and the assertion of the king’s power. In the case of GM, top-level executives like president Alfred Sloan and executive vice president William Knudsen replaced the king. The foreman or plant manager as king’s messenger communicated the company’s policies and asserted corporate hierarchies, which encouraged other workers within the enclosed community to adopt internal surveillance and avoid the potential humiliation of public shame, not to mention breeding fear of the higher stakes of loss of employment if a worker was repeatedly called out. Plant espionage 47 made corporate power structures pervasive, portable, and unpredictable, bringing discipline into what Foucault and Chaplin both call modern times by encouraging workers to internalize monitoring as abstract consciousness and increase conformity. Immediately after the foreman’s reprimand in Modern Times, a large bee swoops and buzzes in front of the tramp, leaving Chaplin’s factory worker to once again battle the conflicting need for regulated nut tightening with the threat of competing distractions – another conflict the tramp loses to outside influences that leave him vulnerable to another round of punishment. The consequences of Chaplin’s moment of scratching, a human response to skin irritation no doubt promulgated by a poorly ventilated factory and a feverish workpace, and the tramp’s batting of the invading bumblebee, are heightened by their placement in the film. The scene that immediately precedes them takes place in another part of the factory – the President’s airy, spacious office at Electro Steel Corp. His secretary delivers a tumbler of water for him to swallow a pill. A later wider-angle shot of the office reveals a water fountain and a wall-mounted cup dispenser within feet of the President’s desk. The water fountain seems out of place in the office, particularly given the President’s water request to his secretary, making the fountain’s positioning one of status through availability, not utility, as the President clearly prefers to demand his secretary’s labor as opposed to inconveniencing himself by disrupting his desktop labor with a few foot walk. The secretary brings in the water from outside of the office, running on her own little metaphorical conveyor belt from her desk, somewhere exterior to his office, to the President’s desk. Her skirt’s hemline brushes mid-calf, tasteful in length but snug on her trim form, suggesting 48 another possible motive for the President’s request for water delivery as opposed to fetching his own water. His thirsts can be quenched in tandem – both seeing the attractive form of his secretary and receiving the necessary liquid. Whereas the assembly line brings items in front of workers for labor, the President has the potential for mobility, yet he is the point of labor contact, waiting for a human assembly line to deliver his requests to him. His zone is nearly as circumscribed as the assembly line workers but within the context of leisure and the comfort of being seated. The President’s labor allows him the freedom to get up for water, but he prefers to call for it, affirming his placement in the labor hierarchy. The President has the leisure to request the water, wait for its arrival, cease his tasks, pick up the water glass, and concentrate on swallowing a pill. The deliberateness of his separate actions contrast with Chaplin’s factory worker’s frenzied scratching of his armpit and his rush to compensate for lost labor time made visible by his work zooming down the assembly line away from him. Unlike Chaplin’s factory worker, the President determines the pace of his own labor; Chaplin as director allows us to view the President’s work, which is neither tightening nuts nor preparing annual reports but reading the newspaper comics, which he tosses aside to continue assembling the remainder of a nearly complete jigsaw puzzle spread across his desk. In light of such leisure, the President’s presumed headache he swallows the pill for is comic, as if his day’s frustrations derive from a particularly elusive puzzle piece that’s frustrating the completion of a given section. Such scenes make Chaplin’s framing of the film as pure entertainment far less persuasive than Skumiatsky’s argument that Modern Times is “a sharp satire on the capitalist system” given the 49 disparity between employer and employee exemplified through the pairing of the President’s pill intake and Chaplin’s armpit scratching. Such explicit critiques of American capitalism suggest that the potential for worker alienation is limitless and that the physical denial of one’s body is impossible. Like Chaplin’s “factory worker,” the President is never personalized with a name and remains another unnamed character in the film who is defined by his title. Unlike the tramp’s identity as “factory worker,” which defines legions of Electro Steel Corp. employees and a national population of industrial laborers, the President, even without his name, is still individuated and recognizable. Electro Steel has one President, and his separate office suite sanctioning him off from the factory behind a beveled glass door emblazoned with his title tells us where power is located. He is recognizable sans name, and nationally, he’s one of an elite group of capitalists who have ascended to the rank of President, mimicking the nation’s leader in title, but not in democracy as corporate policy making isn’t influenced by majority wishes. The temptation to claim equality in that both characters are nameless is erased by the fact the president doesn’t need a name since there’s only one of him, so it’s both a title and a name for a singular body, unlike Chaplin’s factory worker who blends indistinguishably with his fellow industrial laborers, reminiscent of the film’s opening montage of sheep walking towards the camera that cuts to a bustling subway street exit where men emerge in mass and then stream into a factory. In other words, Chaplin’s lack of personalization and name of “factory worker” doesn’t individuate him as a recognizable person, whereas “president” still synchronizes with a specific executive within the context of the Electro Steel Corp. organizational chart. 50 Our privileged entry behind the President’s beveled glass-paneled door that distorts the activities behind it is a reversal of GM’s corporate espionage. As viewers, we get to adopt the role of spy and reverse the gaze, but the question becomes whom does one report back to when those in charge engage in frivolity? The excerpt of the President’s workday that Chaplin shows us alternates between the big boss building a puzzle, reading the comics, glancing up at the assembly line floor visible on a monitor, and ordering instructions to a head foreman to “speed her (the assembly line) up.” While Modern Times is a silent film, there are recorded voices within the film. In fact, the President’s order “Section 5, more speed” comes through on a megaphone and were the first recorded words in a Chaplin film, words that disregard the tolerance of human ability. The Working-Class Body Performs “When people glide along the smooth highway, enjoying the comforts of a modern automobile, little are they mindful of the human price that has been paid to make this possible,” CIO organizer Adolph Germer wrote in a letter to a friend in July 1936 (qtd. in Fine 57-8). During the sit-down against GM, journalists fleshed out Germer’s “human price” by describing workers as “robots” and victims of “occupational psychosis” (59, 62). In calling attention to the chasm between producer and consumer experience, Germer recognizes the Marxist alienation between workers and products. A car that cushions its passengers and smoothly hums along the road is praised for its performance as a machine, but this nonverbal, mechanical performance comes at the expense and erasure of the human performances that have made the car possible and constitute its history. Potential consumers are focused on vehicular 51 performance without the psychological distraction of the “human price” as another deciding factor. An automobile, like most products, requires collaborative human effort to build, but that “human price” is erased when the product is shipped off for third-party sales and the sweatshop conditions of the factory workers are masked for the contented consumer. Much like the foreman who only responds to Chaplin’s factory worker in his moments of inattention, the consumer only considers the maker if something fails on the new vehicle. Materiality rules thought, and commodity fetishism embues the gliding car with a lifeforce independent from the people who produced it. Marx argues that workers become commodities through the division of labor and the assignment of value to their labor, making product values seem inherent as opposed to created. This division of labor created GM laborers who were reduced to being commodified, alienated, exhausted working bodies, due to the dehumanizing workpace demanded by the corporate-controlled assembly line speed. With the assembly line as a major artery running through the factory, tasks could be broken into minutia that allowed a division of labor so discreet and specified that workers required little training and could work at an intensified pace. While only 20% of GM’s 28,455 employees in Flint worked on the assembly line, line speed still determined the overall workpace since items needed for the line had to be produced at the required rate (Fine 54). As one Chevrolet worker noted at the post-sit-down La Follette Committee hearings, “Where you used to be a man,…now you are less than 52 their cheapest tool” (qtd. in Fine 59). 3 The loss of individuality is a theme that echoes throughout labor literature; in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jurgis ultimately feels depleted, deceived and cheapened through ceaseless labor made worse by unfair labor practices. The older men’s desire to stand up and organize that Jurgis had ridiculed becomes his sole hope for empowerment. The Chevrolet worker bitterly noting his involuntary, transitional slippage from man to tool is making a comment on the utter disposability of the laborer. Cheap tools are produced and purchased for their short-term gain and disposability, and GM benefited more from interchangeable, replaceable workers since job training detracted from corporate revenues and made a reduction in workforce turnover desirable, making long-term worker contentment an onerous consideration. Such worker investment was a hindrance to unencumbered corporate growth since long-term workers are more likely to feel entitled to increased benefits and a sense of security and knowledge of corporate value could contribute to rises in complaints. In fact, 26.9% of GM’s workers demanded no training at all while only 9.8% required more than a year of training (Fine 54). By making more than one-quarter of the workforce utterly interchangeable, GM’s investments in job satisfaction were minimized due to a plentiful labor supply available to replace dissatisfied workers. This left workers vulnerable and dehumanized since one’s identity became utterly interchangeable, taking us back to the ease with which Chaplin’s tramp is replaced both on the assembly line and within the context of the prison. Minimizing worker individuality 3 Senator La Follette headed the La Follette Committee, which began conducting investigative hearings four days after the GM strike was settled. The committee’s purpose was both to give the UAW a “national forum” for complaint against GM and was “to counter unfavorable public reaction to the sit- down strike” (qtd. in Fine 333). 53 to the desired point of erasure meant increasing unskilled labor to diminish corporate vulnerability to workers’ demands. Ultimately, a successful labor movement required not only the complete stoppage of labor, but physical occupation of the plants to force corporate recognition of the worker and reconstitute the worker from tool back to man. Since assembly line speeds were not subject to change based on employee complaints, protests about speed-ups were typically ignored for the greater good of profit margins and increased production. One worker summarized the assembly line by saying GM was “getting more production with less men” (Fine 56). But, consequences were more drastic than frenzied rushing as one GM punch-press operator “lost three fingers and another a thumb because of the speed at which the machines were operated” (56). The worker’s body was literally disfigured and corporeally punished by a failure to comply with the demands of the line. The workers became robots as mechanized, ceaseless repetition dominated the day, and the body’s actions became more autonomic and less sentient. The 55-year old’s twice-repeated lament of cruelty becomes an apt term for the worksite, which became an Artaudian theatre of cruelty. Artaud fetishizes the body, and the laborer’s body operated on many levels. The actual plant work required a retardation of thought in order to direct all of one’s energies into sustaining the necessary pace. Working on the line became an endurance performance motivated by the literal threat of loss of limbs, but the movements became automatic as workers were pushed to be more cyborg than human. 54 While the workers did return home at night – the factor distinguishing GM employment from prison life – job strain was not left behind with the punch of the time card. The “shakes” was the word workers and their families used to describe the brutal, transportable labor “performance” workers brought home. One GM worker’s wife described her husband and the other men coming home from work: “So tired like they was dead, and irritable…And then at night in bed, he shakes, his whole body, he shakes” (Fine 57). The unconscious sleeping mind repeated the patterns of the day’s work. Workers’ dream lives were permeated by the work day, and even if one escaped the plant with all digits and limbs intact, the night body performed the strain and stress of the day. The unconsciously performing body remains intimately connected to the labor it performed during the day, and imaginary dream space is not even one’s own. Another wife described her husband as “a young man grown old from the speed-up (who) wakened the next morning with his hands so swollen he couldn’t hold a fork” (57). Like the shaking dreams, the swollen hands act outside of the worker’s desires. The swollen hands are the physical manifestation of the night’s shakes. The body carries signs of exhaustive labor, and the idea of cruelty once again seems an apt description. Despite constant exhaustion, and because of it, the physical wearing down of the worker’s body stimulated a generative dissatisfaction to the extent that the recognition of oppression and the performance demanded by the body resulted in the movement to strike. Performance studies critic Marvin Carlson offers a concise way to distinguish performance from everyday activity and offers some boundaries for notions of performance: “The difference between doing and performing…would seem to lie not 55 in the frame of theatre versus real life but in an attitude – we may do actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this introduces a consciousness that gives them the quality of performance” (149). For Carlson, the workday routine of GM workers would be “doing” since the work was performed unthinkingly. In fact, thinking prohibited successfully completing one’s task given the intensity level required for rapid assembly line work. When Chaplin’s factory worker is momentarily distracted first by scratching his armpit and then by the intrusive bee, his “doing” is disrupted. However, the doing/performing binary frays in light of workers who were incapable of the cessation of “doing” their job. Carlson cites thought, which suggest awareness, as the distinguishing feature of performance, but workers who stepped away from the assembly line still “doing” or enacting a rhythmical version of their labor and those who suffered from “the shakes” became involuntary performers since the work they performed was a reduced version of their labor and the actual object of their labor was absent. What I’m labeling involuntary performance was not the result of thought, but of “doing” melding with redundancy so engrained it became reflex. To return to Marx, as the “division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery” (87). For the auto workers, increased line speeds and the expectation of higher labor output created a “burden of toil” in the form of inescapable, involuntary performance. The specter of labor threaded with daily life, never allowing one to forget one’s occupation and making one’s body marked by labor to the larger population. The division of labor is an alienating force, and as 56 assembly line tasks were divided into smaller and more highly redundant subsets and with line speeds that were unresponsive to workers’ pleas, the ability to stop “doing” or performing exponentially increased. To return to Modern Times, the scene in which Chaplin’s factory worker walks away from the assembly line waving his two wrenches and reflexively tightening imaginary nuts in the air in front of him best demonstrates the doing/performing split. The moment is comic, but any laughter is almost a reactive by-product of relief incited by seeing Chaplin’s factory worker cease his exhaustive, concentrated labor on the line. Once the consequences of untightened steel rafts of nuts floating by or failing to be tightened enough (something Chaplin’s factory worker is also reprimanded for) dissipate, his foibles become more comic than catastrophic. Chaplin’s air nut tightening was mirrored by a grimmer reality; one GM worker had to make “115 double motions per minute with his hands” (Fine 57). In this performance of alienation, the physical body refused to obey the cerebral knowledge that work was finished, be it for lunch or a shift, and the inability to stop one’s performance was no doubt a frustration that contributed to the shift from “man to tool” that the GM worker noted. One became a tool in the sense that one’s job function at work became inseparable from the rest of one’s life, making the worksite a spectral space to the extent that it was transported within the worker, making work a palpable performance within all experiences, including home life. Just as Chaplin’s tramp is called “the factory worker” even though assembly line work only occupies him for the first one-fifth of the film, so too was the GM worker a factory worker even outside of the domain of the plant. 57 During the strike itself, a reporter for the New York Times interviewed various strikers and “discovered that when the men began to explain their jobs, ‘their bodies involuntarily begin to sway in the rhythmical motions they are accustomed to make on the line’” (Fine 57). If performing is distinguished from doing by consciousness and attitude, this behavior very much blurs that line. Their rhythmical actions were involuntary and unconscious, which falls under Carlson’s notions of “doing” and outside of performance, but the “doing” in this situation “performed” the individual’s labor within the larger performance of the strike. Performance also becomes defined by the viewer as the reporter notes a distinction between the body language of everyday conversation with the workers and the motions set into sway by a description of one’s labor. The body’s memory is powerful and permeated by work, and while the strikers did not exactly repeat the motions of labor, the sway is an understated mock-up of their work. The reporter’s phrase “rhythmical motions” suggests grace and dance within the movements. This new type of dance suggests General Motors’ power as their ownership of the physical body is manifested, reminding us of the swollen hands and the nightly shakes, more performances beyond individual control. Performance studies critics like Richard Schechner and Peggy Phelan use elements like time or duration to define performance, but what happens when the performance of labor becomes transportable and inherent? In other words, if we perform involuntarily, duration loses its viability as a defining term for performance. A performance without duration becomes an endurance performance, and while endurance suggests a timeframe without a defined termination point, endurance also 58 requires intensity, which cannot be sustained infinitely. Endurance, and endurance performances, are not feasible long-term lifestyles since periods of sustained intensity are bound to have a termination point, even if that termination point is involuntary exhaustion or physical depletion. This returns us to the disposability of the worker as a cheap tool ready to be abused and tossed away. GM could demand endurance performances because without seniority and with seasonal hiring and layoff cycles, the company did not have to justify the failure to rehire any worker. Plus, with an exhaustive abundance of new laborers, there was always a fresh worker ready to adopt low wages and blindly begin their own endurance performance, unaware of the consequences and the impossibility of sustaining that performance. Like Jurgis at the opening of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, they perceived their own virility and ferocity for success, seeing the older generation as used up, not as an inevitable foreshadowing of their own future. The foil for the “speed-up” became the “sit-down” as bionic workers unable to escape their own performances of work finally stopped performing by ceasing work entirely – or at least ceasing the kind of labor GM had demanded. The antidote to the endurance performance demanded by the speed-up became the “sit-down” as workers struck the plants. The sit-down became its own endurance performance in terms of being comfortable with uncertainty, defending the occupation of the plant, strategizing, maintaining morale and keeping order within the plants. The sit-down strike was the best option to force GM to recognize a particular set of workers. The company had tried to undermine worker individuality through frenetic workpaces, unpredictable rehiring strategies, and unionbreaking spy networks, so the sit-down 59 provided both a shroud and a layer of armor. Since the plants were continually occupied by workers, the factory contents became an unspoken bargaining chip since GM was somewhat cautious about attacking or forcing evacuation, fearing worker destruction of company property. Since the sit-downers’ activities within the plants were hidden from outside view and all visitors had to be pre-approved by the strike committee, the rituals and performances of daily life during the sit-down were hidden. This shroud created corporate discomfort and the desire to resolve the strike peaceably. With 14% of the workforce still unemployed – roughly 9 million people – in 1937, physical occupation of the plants also prevented the importation of a renewable scab labor workforce drawn from the reserve army of the unemployed (McElvaine 298). The union’s sit-down forced GM to reconcile with the bodies present. Work as a spectral performance dissipated as laborers who were haunted by the inescapability of their labor collaborated to disjoint perfect corporate hierarchy with their continual presence. The plants became spectral spaces to the extent their use deviated from their original purpose to become both home and stage for a new type of work. The scene in Modern Times in which Chaplin’s factory worker grips his wrenches as he lays astride the conveyor belt pursing untightened nuts and is rolled down and threaded through the factory’s oversized gears is an iconic moment in film history, so widely recognized it’s identifiable even by those who have not seen the film and may not know its title. In an 83-minute film where the tramp’s career as a factory worker only consumes the first 18 minutes, this is a moment that resonates cross-generationally, suggesting not just superior filmmaking but the continued 60 relevance of the contested relationship between the individual and his or her labor. Chaplin’s factory worker slipping through the machinery and literally turning into a cog was a visual metaphor for the reality thousands of autoworkers faced on a daily basis. The scene draws attention to the inability to stop performing one’s labor, suggesting the inherent interconnectness of labor and the body, and the ways in which work demands a compliant performance from the body. If work is a performance that dominates the majority of the day, it’s also a performance that’s difficult to disengage from by punching a timeclock. Work is a specter that haunts our lives, and Chaplin’s cranking forearms visually perform not just the difficulty, but the profound impossibility, of leaving work behind with a turn away from the line. 61 Chapter 2 Women on the Frontlines Did you hear the shrilling screams of angry wives That dared the slugging blue coats with their lives And stormed the streets outside the factory gates? Did you see them break the windows glass by glass And let escape the blinding, strangling force of gas, In fighting female fury to succor endangered mates?” Final stanza of “Were You There? A Saga of the Flint Sit Down” by Floyd Hoke-Miller (autoworker, Plant 4 sit-downer, and poet laureate of the strike) In an image taken in Flint, Michigan on January 3, 1937, a woman piles a man’s arms with provisions inside the sit-down strike commissary. The image reaffirms gendered norms; the woman in a petticoated dress faces the camera and smiles brightly as she balances the next item on the man’s already loaded, but still firmly outstretched, arms. His piled arms demonstrate both his strength and willingness to carry more goods. Dan-Dee Potato Bread, Wonder Bread, Armour Pork and Beans, baskets of potatoes, boxes of eggs, canned spinach, and 50 pound sugar sacks line the commissary shelves, rations for the sit-down strikers who were only four days in to their occupation of General Motors’ plants. A month after the smiling commissary image, a very different image of female strike participation was splashed across the front page of the February 2, 1937 issue of the Detroit News. In the photograph, taken in Flint on February 1, women are 62 raising clubs and breaking windows at Plant 9, a decoy plant that allowed the true target, Plant 4, to be taken as a sit-down site. The headline above the image shouts, “Women Join in Window-Smashing at Chevrolet Plant,” and the caption adds the details, “Women with clubs joined in the melee that took place at the Chevrolet plant No. 9 at Flint Monday night. As they swarmed around the walls of the factory, they used their clubs to smash windows.” Neither the headline nor the caption offer a rationale for the violence, portraying the women as an unchecked mob, something analogous to the descent of the Bacchae, with the word “swarm” signifying a population density uncontainable by the camera’s frame, even though only 10 women are in front of the windows. This act of violence remains mysteriously arbitrary and unmotivated until reading the article, which lightly speculates that tear gas bombs may have been tossed into the plant, leaving readers to make the logical leap that the women’s window-bashing was an attempt to provide air to the interred sit-downers. Floyd Hoke-Miller’s poem cited as an epigraph to this chapter, “Were You There? A Saga of the Flint Sit Down,” documents the same event via poetry and contextualizes female fury as an act of bravery, turning the Detroit News’ “smashing” to “succor” as the wives rush to help their threatened husbands choking on tear gas. He translates the apparent unconsciousness of their rescue mission as animal instinct with the use of the word “mates” as opposed to the seemingly unmotivated destruction detailed in the Detroit News story, which fed negative views of strikers as violent. Like most regional newspapers during the sit-down, the Detroit News was corporate-biased in favor of General Motors since GM was both the region’s financial lifeblood both directly, via plant employment, and indirectly, via outlets like spending 63 on advertising, a financial wellstream local papers feared alienating, so the paper barely touches on the police tear gas bomb attack on the sequestered workers. Even an article in the New York Times, outside of regional influence and which tended to be fairer in frontline strike reporting, fails to improve on the reporting biases in Detroit. Their article claimed the women “used heavy clubs to break windows in the plant, so that the union men inside could see what their friends outside were doing and vice versa” (Women’s Brigade 1). The article makes no mention of tear gas, placing this reporting even a notch below the light speculations in the Detroit article. The nonsensical causality of breaking windows to see out portrays the women and the strikers as motivated by spontaneity and disrespectful of company property, never mentioning the women’s true intent of providing air to counter tear gas attacks. The article also unnecessarily focuses on the female body, noting the leader, Mrs. Johnson, is a “slim, short, frail looking young woman weighing about 120 pounds” (1). Female weight estimates are utterly irrelevant and most certainly would not have been detailed for a male participant. A blatantly gendered reporting bias robs women of their activism, transforming them into arbitrary and flighty destroyers of property, whereas Hoke-Miller’s version presents the women in collective terms. Ironically given the poetic genre, his version is the most accurate of the three reports about the day’s events, capturing the frenzy and bravery of the battle scene. Clearly, the news had a vested interest in slanting public opinion against the strikers. Headlines that conspired with portraits of women as rabid, vapid strike participants encouraged easy conclusions while providing little in the way of counterargument or even-handedness. 64 What these two images separated by less than a month visually encapsulate in snapshot form is just how rapidly a faction of the women who were part of the strike culture emerged as militant advocates. The strike heightened the polarity and visibility of gender lines. To maintain the sit-down, a contingent of workers had to perpetually occupy the plant. When the strike began, all female factory employees were dismissed from the sit-down space. While the obvious conclusion of gender discrimination is not invalid, the decision to evict the women resulted from the already vulnerable strike committee’s awareness that having women behind plant walls in mixed company with male workers would result in corporate accusations of prostitution. Regardless of their falsity, such claims would invariably damage the strikers’ credibility with a corporate spin of illicit hedonism. The strike committee also realized the strikers’ wives were not likely to support a potential tinderbox of infidelity with their husbands behind plant walls with other women for an indeterminate timeperiod. Support from the home front made it easier for the men to support, and continue supporting, the strike. Given such factors, the small percentage of female GM workers, relative to their male counterparts, were ousted from behind plant walls at the strike’s start 4 . These foresights proved to be on-point because even without female employees residing in the plant, GM tried to stir dissent and heighten local prejudice by claiming the strikers were bringing in prostitutes, another angle on their attempts to portray the strikers as irresponsible, immoral freeloaders. The strike diary of Fisher Body 2 sit- 4 I couldn’t find any exact numbers about the female to male employee ratio, just generalizations that the number of female employees was quite low relative to male counterparts, which would have been typical for industrialized, assembly line work in an auto plant. 65 downer Francis O’Rourke counters and contextualizes this false accusation in writing, “They say we're lazy workers. Is a man lazy if he has not missed a day's work in two years, has not been late and kept up with a line manufacturing forty-five bodies an hour all that time?” (O’Rourke). O’Rourke is clearly wounded by the injustice of this narrow, corporate accusation, which accordingly fails to account for the sustained injustices the workers have suffered while still maintaining back-breaking quotas. In fact, when the strike started, GM representatives did door-to-door strike-breaking at workers’ homes, telling wives that their husbands were playing poker, having strip tease parties, and had abandoned their families to engage in licentious behavior (Dollinger Interview 16). In her oral history, Genora Johnson, wife of Plant 4 strike leader Kermit Johnson, recounts wives threatening their husbands with divorce if they stayed inside, a threat no doubt propelled by GM propaganda, and one that both encouraged male desertion and therefore jeopardized the strike’s success (15). The securing of female support was clearly a lynchpin for the strike’s success. What ensued during the 44 days of the strike actually created enormous opportunities for women outside of plant walls as a result of the temporary gendered schism created by the strike. With a significant male worker population trapped behind plant walls for the duration of the sit-down, one by-product of the sit-down was the temporary creation of a more highly segregated gendered community that resulted in a reversal of traditional roles. The men inside the factories adopted a mirrored version of a traditionally female domestic space of privacy. While movement in and out of the factory was not completely circumscribed, all entrances and exits had to be approved in order to maintain a viable strike force inside the 66 plants at all times to forestall GM’s importation of replacement labor or defend against attack. Many strike photos show the sit-downers leaning out of plant windows to gauge, assess, and peripherally participate in outside activities. The heavy contingent of workers who needed to remain behind plant walls reduced the male presence on the frontlines. While undoubtedly not connecting it to gender role reversal, General Motors recognized the privacy element of the occupied plant and deemed it problematic in that the company lacked visibility into the goings on behind plant walls during the strike. The conversion of the workspace into a private domestic space was a threat because GM was concerned about the strikers damaging property, especially expensive machinery. The strikers were cautious and anticipated charges from GM, so carefully ensured company property was undamaged, only changing what was needed to convert the factory into a domestic space, such as moving seats out of the stuffing room to create sleeping quarters, which is why reporting on unmotivated window breaking was so damaging. However, this privacy also inadvertently offered something of an insurance policy in that General Motors was tentative to attack the sit-downers since the company would risk inadvertently damaging their own means of production in the process. Most readings of the strike have primarily focused on the male sit-downers, and the documents tracing female experience are limited, making the ephemera even more ephemeral. What we know of women’s participation emerges in fragmented, piecemeal documentation since the events of the moment were responsive to strike conditions and were not necessarily documented, especially since the strikers were the focal point. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor argues for a 67 movement away from what she sees as the stifling limitations of an archive that perpetuates power structures and towards a nonarchival, embodied repertoire. While Taylor cites access points such a repertoire, such as not privileging texts and being sensitive to physical location and bodies in motion, the repertoire is also inherently slippery in that a performance is uniquely bounded by time and place, so historical performances that lack archival coverage open questions about the efficacy of the repertoire. Taylor argues, “Every performance enacts a theory, and every theory performs in the public sphere” (27). In this case, I want to show the framework of performance offers a way to trace the stories of these women who gained strength through common purpose, performed a communal knowledge of corporate abuse taking its toll on familial life, and transmitted messages of exploitation to others. The heightened gender divide created by the strike transported women from private to public space, and in the public act of performing for the rights of the strikers, they began to translate their own injustices and demands. Female picketers held signs not just supporting the strikers but demanding Equal Pay for Equal Work, taking a step beyond the immediate concerns for union recognition and moving towards feminist ends. Such picket lines were always photographed for newspaper coverage, thereby spreading the women’s messages for a more just working world. Existing documents highlight the women’s sense of camaraderie and the awe of recognizing the power of collective activism. The women were self-aware of their performances given the intense coverage of the 44-day sit-down by local, national and international media. On the local level, much of the Flint community resented the strikers and sided with General Motors since the company was the area’s primary 68 employer and economic backbone, and many locals feared alienating GM. During the strike, the women outside of the plants built and developed a female community that went beyond its initial, immediate concern of food preparation for factory-bound strikers. Ultimately, the private domestic world turned politically empowering, and potentially threatening, as these women adopted more traditionally male roles, like public speaking and policy planning. They advocated for the men sequestered behind plant walls in a political twist on the domestic, and the women gained greater awareness of their latent talents and the potential for power as a group. The consequences of this activism were an increasingly unified female front of cooperation that outwardly demonstrated the extent of the strikers’ support network. The male sit-downers inside plant walls struggled with boredom. Strike diaries testify to the degree that isolation made the group subject to dejection and fluctuations in mood, especially as the strike, and their internment, dragged on. The women arranged entertainment to help the strikers combat despair, adding yet another level to the range of performances they developed during this compressed period. This surge in female participation picked up on the rise in female labor in the workforce during the Depression. With average national unemployment rates hovering around 20% throughout the decade, desperation drove families to abandon the sole male breadwinner model and attempt to utilize all employable workers, including married women. On the flip side of the coin, female participation in the strike also anticipated the rise of the female workforce during World War II. While not recognized in the history of 20 th century feminist achievement, strike participation 69 was nestled between the fight for suffrage and the rise in the wartime female labor force, encapsulating a pre-feminism model of advocacy. The limited descriptions regarding female performance are clearly bifurcated by both authorial gender and gendered norms. Narratives by men frame tasks like food preparation in complimentary terms; the performance of such tasks alleviated burdens associated with food, and those narratives reinforce “safe” and “sanctioned” forms of female participation. Male descriptors of more nontraditional female participation, such as the militant Women’s Emergency Brigade, become more fractured and tend to describe women in less complimentary and more masculinized terms. For instance, in his strike account, Henry Kraus, editor of The Flint Auto Worker during the strike, refers to plans by the National Guard to oust the sit- downers. He briefly chronicles a series of somewhat improbable, humorously proposed solutions, yet for the lone suggestion given by a woman, he feels the need to qualify her as a “doughty Amazon” (Kraus 243). While Kraus is describing the opposition, not the strike’s female insurgents, his commentary is symptomatic to the extent that women acting outside of expected conventions are masculinized. Instead of being another unnamed suggestion presented equally, the woman is slighted as an “Amazon,” associating brutishness with masculinized women. Kraus notes a range of female contributions from the kitchen to entertaining the male sit-downers with dances and games. One popular game was labor charades in which the strikers guessed the labor terminology or strike events the women acted out, which included terms like “solidarity forever” and “sole collective bargaining” (Kraus 260-61). Kraus generally speaks about male sit-downers and female 70 participation in collective terms that eradicate difference, but his desire for a united front ends up coming across as false since in other accounts, he does not treat all forms of female involvement equally. For instance, in the periodical The Flint Auto Worker, which Kraus edited, he rarely dwells on the specific contributions of the militant Women’s Emergency Brigade but instead focuses on the benign, socially acceptable strike kitchen, which was headed by his wife, Dorothy Kraus. However, Kraus does concede in his book that “For the strike was often to prove the beginning of life to these women, at least the beginning of a conscious social life” (240-41). Kraus may be overstating the fact since some women, including Dorothy Kraus and Genora Johnson, founder of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, were politically active before the sit-down. However, he is correct in noting that recognizing the power of the collective was a critical inception point for many participants, but this was true for both men and women. Even historian Sidney Fine, who benefits from the vantage point of history and wrote the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the sit- down 30 years after the event, fails to develop any breadth of content or nuance around female strike participation. Traditional female-based labor, such as meal preparation, was omnipresent over the course of the strike since the men behind plant walls lacked proper kitchen facilities and their female loved ones outside of plant walls were the logical source for that labor and exhibition of strike support. Internal plant resources limited culinary complexities to coffee and sandwiches, so the women quickly formed a “food committee” responsible for the preparation and delivery of three meals a day to strikers inside Fisher 1, Fisher 2, and later, Chevy 4. The restaurant across from 71 Fisher 1 was almost solely frequented by workers and was donated as a strike kitchen, a rare sympathetic pro-labor gesture among Flint’s business owners who were generally cowed by General Motors as the town’s lifeblood, even if GM employees were the ones who provided their financial base. Restaurants donated as strike kitchens were not limited to the central Flint sit-down locale; in Anderson, Indiana, a unionist-owned restaurant next to the striking Guide Lamp plant was donated as a strike kitchen during the 17-day sit-down in that city (Hoffman 39). Flint’s daily strike population to feed surged to upwards of 2,000 at times, making both the securing of provisions and food preparation a chronic activity and a full-time job for many women (Fine 161). Donations of food, supplies, and money were sought and trickled in from Flint businesses and farmers. At other national strike sites, such as Anderson, Indiana, the donation seekers were dubbed the “mooching committee” given their continuous need to reach out for contributions to sustain the strike (Hoffman 39). Other labor organizations, most significantly the United Mine Workers (UMW), made generous monetary donations that covered the majority of food and expenses (Dollinger Interview 14). UMW president and famed labor leader John L. Lewis saw the autoworkers as another ally in the fight for industrial, non-craft-based unionization and since their win would strengthen the fledgling CIO, Lewis, also a notably fierce negotiator, was intimately involved with the sit-down negotiations in Flint. 72 Flint’s strike kitchen was headed by Dorothy Kraus (wife of Henry Kraus, editor of The Flint Auto Worker) and Hazel Simons 5 (a secretary at the union hall before the strike and whose husband, Bud, was the chairman of the Fisher 1 strike committee). Dorothy had headed the strike kitchen at Detroit’s eight-day Midland Steel sit-down in November-December 1936, a role which prepared her for leading the same effort in Flint (Fine 130). The wives of Fisher 1 sit-downers represented the largest female contingency since Fisher 1 was the largest plant on strike, and they primarily ran the strike kitchen. While Henry Kraus wasn’t an autoworker, both he and Bud Simons were well-known union forces whose credibility was strengthened by partners who didn’t contest, but participated in, their activism. Such pairs made the union a new familial core, not a divisive force, and increased conversion among other families who wanted to share in the new community and familial model. Max Gazan, a former chef at Detroit’s upscale Athletic Club, assisted with the strike kitchen, and like Kraus, he had donated strike kitchen efforts in the earlier Midland Steel sit-down (161). Gazan would go on to participate in other area sit-downs and was a member of Detroit’s Culinary Workers Union, Local 605. The fledgling UAW’s many enemies from GM to the freshly formed Flint Alliance, which was founded by local businessmen to break the union, were countered not just by UAW members and their 5 There is some dispute in terms of strike history over the actual “head” of the strike kitchen. In Henry Kraus’ chronicle of the strike, The Many and the Few, which has been widely criticized for bias and inaccuracy, he unsurprisingly gives full credit to his wife Dorothy and Max Gazan (93). And since Kraus edited the Flint Auto Worker, food-related pictures in that periodical always showcase Dorothy Kraus. In Rose Pesotta’s less-biased account of the strike as a CIO labor organizer (although she was admittedly less involved given her brief stints in Flint), she gives credit to Hazel Simons (239). Given the frequent appearance of both names, both women were clearly actively involved in the day-to-day operations of the strike kitchen and any attempts to name and distinguish a leader or founder would be forced exaggerations of nominal differences, not indicators of true merit. For the purposes of this record, Kraus and Simons will share the limelight credit for strike kitchen operations given the significant role they both played. 73 families but by a network of union brethren, like Gazan, who supported and augmented the autoworkers’ numbers. CIO labor organizer and International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) vice-president Rose Pesotta came to Flint on two separate occasions during the strike and noted with surprise that the agreement the workers signed to join the union decreed union members must support national unionization whenever possible by buying union-made goods and should never discriminate against a fellow worker, wrong him, or see him wronged (Pesotta 237). Ultimately, and even if it wasn’t explicitly stated and signed, the autoworkers depended on cross-union acceptance of this philosophy since the UAW’s success was clearly not a single-union victory given the support of the ILGWU, United Mine Workers’ president John L. Lewis as a negotiator, and Culinary Union leaders like Gazan. In fact, Gazan’s spirit of brotherhood embodied the very ideology the UAW wanted to inculcate, which was that one’s own union and membership was a point of origin that germinated in nationwide union support. Even during the strike, the poverty-stricken Flint workers went beyond this ideology in scrapping together money for victims devastated by flooding in the Ohio River Valley that was concurrent with the strike. In his sit-down strike diary, Francis O’Rourke writes, “The boys are taking up a collection for the flood sufferers and I'm surprised at the amount they have. Pennies amount up to dollars, all right. We feel so sorry for those poor people” (O’Rourke). Even in their own dire situation marked by an unknown outcome, the constant threat of supplies and heat being cut off, and no incoming paychecks since December 30, the sit- 74 downers reached out to offer financial assistance to those whom they felt were suffering even greater privation. Max Gazan’s selflessness in the strike kitchen was repaid in short order as UAW workers rehearsed the edicts they promised to adhere to in assisting his culinary workers union. In April 1937 (only two months after the UAW strike’s conclusion), a letter from Gazan appeared in the fourth issue of Auto Women Advance, a Flint periodical, in which he thanks the autoworkers and members of the Women’s Auxiliary and Emergency Brigade for assisting with a sit-down at Flint’s Durant Hotel that resulted in union recognition for the culinary workers (Gazan 3). Even more symbolically for the autoworkers, and a fact that undoubtedly resonated with readers, the Durant was the hotel where the final stages of the first contract between the UAW and GM had been negotiated and signed. Layering that symbolism with irony, the Durant was named after the founder of General Motors, William Crapo Durant. The culinary union’s success actualizes the new definition of community based on unionization and demonstrates the infectious spirit of unionization that was spurred by the UAW win and General Motors’ concessions. The power of collective performance gave union hopefuls across industries the courage to collectively bargain. The UAW mandates flirted with a more collective world view as Pesotta notes the union referendum instructed new members to “subordinate every selfish impulse to the task of elevating the material, intellectual, and moral condition of the automobile worker” (qtd. in Pesotta 237). This doctrine basically commanded constant evaluation of the greater good against personal good and the repression and rechanneling of selfish individualism into the advancement of 75 the collective good. With many families depending on auto worker males as sole wage earners, this mandate demonstrated the utopian impulses of the new union that was going to help forge a new society. The fourth issue of the Punch Press, one of the strike bulletins, printed an end of week menu for the sit-downers, showing meals were carefully planned well in advance; by extension, the vast quantities of any one product necessary for a single meal must have either been in possession or purchasable before issuing the menu. The collaboration, cooperation and time commitment necessary for sustaining meal preparations undoubtedly fostered bonds between the women and progressively inculcated initially resistant or doubtful wives into the strike community’s shared dedication to victory. The introductory menu copy cheerily chirps, “Oyster stews and chicken dinners with trimmings form part of the meals out of the strike-kitchens. Not fancy, but tasty and lots of it” (Strike Menu 5). This text establishes menu expectations as simple, well-prepared, abundant food that will nourish the strikers, providing them with the necessary vim and vigor to wage their battle without lapsing into overindulgence. Saturday’s menu lists eggs, coffee, bread and fruits for breakfast; roast leg of veal and vegetables with bread and butter for dinner; and a supper of kippered herring, potato salad, bread and coffee. The Sunday menu included fruits and coffee for breakfast; a supper of celery and pickles, chicken dinner, dressing, peas, browned potatoes and ice cream; and a dinner of baked beans, fruit salad, bread and coffee. A letter from a Chevy 4 sit-downer dated February 7, 1937 appears to reference this very meal saying, “We are having chicken and ice cream for our Sunday dinner, but as far as the ice cream is concerned the heat has 76 been off for five days and it is cold enough” (qtd. in Pesotta 249). One can only speculate the ice cream was a donation since the combination of Michigan’s low- dipping winter temperatures and the absence of heat in Plant 4 would make ice cream a misguided, irrelevant purchase and something better served as an ironically symbolic corporate gift from GM who was trying to freeze out the strikers. On Pesotta’s tour of Chevy 4, she notes the men were continually bundled to stave off the cold since the plant was without heat, and many sit-downers wore flannel pajamas on top of their regular clothes (Pesotta 248). However, the abundant luxury of home- cooked meals led many strikers to comment jokingly that meals during strike conditions were more hearty and plentiful than those they regularly had. Based on available menus, while hypothermia was a periodic battle thanks to GM intermittently turning off the heat, starvation was one threat the workers didn’t face. If anything, the menu with its veal and chicken dinners exceeds the expectations established by the introductory copy. However, given the risks of legal injunctions and maintaining a community under dire circumstances like freezing temperatures, strike life was hardly synonymous with easy street, either for the male sit-downers or the female workforce required to regularly churn out such mass quantities. The chronic fear of GM cutting off food supplies led the strikers to store some goods inside the plants and guard provisions in transport. The necessity of guarded transport and the tremendous loss should provisions be intercepted is transparent considering the average collective daily intake included 500 pounds of meat, 100 pounds of potatoes, 300 loaves of bread, 200 pounds of sugar and 30 gallons of milk (Fine 161). In the letter quoted above, the same Chevy 4 sit-downer goes on to say, “I 77 see by the paper the Union has bought 1200 pounds of chicken for today’s dinner, thats lots of chicken what” (qtd. in Pesotta 249). The massive scale of union expenditures relied on support from the CIO, which was primarily funded by the UMW, which had already achieved significant measures in unionization, returning to the relevance of the national fostering of unionization as an effort. In one of the pocket-sized notebooks he kept during the strike, Bud Simons, the strike committee chairman for Fisher 1 and a member of the executive board, notes breakfast is at 8:00, dinner at 1:00 and supper at 7:00 (Simons). Regulated mealtimes were consistent with the overall regulation of the strike schedule, which was designed to create and maintain order. The strikers were divided into 10-person family groups, and the groups rotated assigned tasks. Shared mealtimes brought everyone together and increased accountability since the visibility of mealtime both discouraged defection and simplified sussing out potential stools. The strikers were conditioned to an exhausting work schedule and intense self-regulation in order to complete the work demanded by the pace of the speed-up and the assembly line. To counter total defamiliarization and minimize restlessness, a strike schedule was adopted to mimic and blend the domestic and work worlds and create accountability. Even so, and as Rose Pesotta notes on her tour of Fisher 1, the strikers’ comments to her universally expressed the common frustration that “it was tough to sit around and do nothing after the speed-up had got into their blood” (Pesotta 239). Pesotta’s February visit suggests that even after weeks of the strike, the workers never acclimated to life off of the line, contrary to corporate accusations of laziness. The speed-up was carcinoma-like to the extent that its intolerability was a primary source 78 of the strike, yet its complete domination of the body left workers feeling alienated from themselves and unable to recapture the capacity for restfulness in a body that had never experienced the speed-up. The repetition that the speed-up had gotten into their blood suggests permanent, cellular-level change, a single-generationed evolution, and this intangible wasn’t something strike-settled wage gains addressed, making the regulation of line speed a critical win for the strikers. Even though Hazel Simons was an active strike supporter, she forbid discussion of the union or the strike in front of her children. Even if her motive was to no doubt protect and shield her children from what she deemed adult matters, her decision attempted to segregate the home as unchanging in response to external factors. Her actions probably bewildered her children who were undoubtedly cognizant of inexplicable changes in normalized routines. Hazel Simons’ philosophy starkly contrasts with another significant female strike contributor, Genora Johnson 6 , whose husband, Kermit Johnson, was strike leader at Chevy 4 and whose brother, Jarvis Albro, was also a striking autoworker. Genora even recruited her 16-year old sister, Barbara, and her two children for the advancement of the strike. Her two-year old son, Jarvis, led the children’s picket line that Genora organized where the strikers’ sons, daughters, and younger relatives carried picket signs and marched. At one point, the police showed up at the Johnson apartment, which Kermit and Genora rented from her parents who owned and lived in the building and watched their sons. Since Genora was a target as an impassioned activist, the police wanted to uncover 6 Genora Johnson later remarried and became Genora Dollinger. However, for the purposes of this work, she will be referred to as Genora Johnson since that was her married name at the time of the strike. 79 incriminating evidence about her, hoping to silence or at least discredit her. The police found her older son at home alone with his younger brother. In response to an inquiry about where their mother was, her 6-year old defiantly stated he was on strike duty watching his little brother until his grandma came upstairs, and elaborated by saying, “Well, our father and our whole family is out on strike and we have got to win this strike and this is my strike duty” (Dollinger Interview 23). For the Johnson family, the idea of babysitting was contextualized as part of a wider strike effort that trickled down and depended on the assistance of a six-year old for its success, suggesting no action was too small. Genora’s activism was not bound by more traditional forms of female strike participation, such as kitchen duty and childcare, for she spearheaded what became a new model of female participation by inserting herself where she identified a need. She was a frontrunner in equalizing the proverbial gender playing field and taking the first steps to bring women to the forefront of the strike struggle. This is not to minimize the radicalism and bravery of the women who performed kitchen duty given the tensions and local animosity towards the sit-down and the strikers, especially since the men behind plant walls depended on those women so much. Genora recounts that strike leader Bob Travis automatically sent her to the kitchen when she first volunteered as a strike supporter, suggesting the way even a progressive organizer such as Travis earmarked female participation on auto-pilot, instead of diversifying resources. However, once Genora ascertained the kitchen unit was already well-staffed and running smoothly, thus minimizing the positive impact she could have in terms of the larger good of the strike, she returned to Travis and 80 suggested she form a sign painting division for picket signs (Dollinger Interview 12). Travis instantly approved her idea, demonstrating his willingness to break away from default mode and entertain resources in alternate ways that increased efficiency and stretched the thin support of the foundling union effort. Travis’ progressivism under the power of suggestion was a first step in male recognition of female participation, a recognition that spread over the course of the strike as female performances became more radical, less traditional, and more assertive – all steps in remolding gender role perceptions. While sign painting may seem banal, it had far-reaching effects. Johnson didn’t just paint the signs as ordered; she created their messages, making her a defacto marketing and public relations manager who created content that integrally shaped strike rhetoric and perceptions of the sit-down by the outside world, including those in Flint and across the nation and world who saw newspaper photographs of pickets shouldering Genora’s signs. The genre of the picket sign depends on collectivity, clarity and cohesion of the messages, making it a microcosm of the strike as a whole, which depends largely on the same factors. For picketers to be willing to carry a picket sign, it must convey the strike’s purpose as perceived by the striking party; beyond that, picketers must feel a sense of ownership in the message, as if they themselves authored the sign. Much like a pre-printed greeting card, a picket sign must capture and appropriately express the individual’s feelings and position, making authorial anonymity essential for the picket sign genre to create the potential for ownership. Beyond this, picket signs are limited by a series of significant restraints. First, they must convey a clear message; that clarity includes readability in terms of 81 contrast between the background color and the letters as well as an appropriately sized font that is easy-to-read, relatively uniform, and can be taken in at an unstrained glance from a distance. Limits on lettering are accompanied by purely physical constraints. The picketer must be able to carry the sign without easily tiring, so the available space for creative real estate is fairly narrow since anything too small will be unreadable from any distance and will lose effectiveness, and anything too large will be unwieldy and therefore impractical. Picket sign efficacy increases when signs appear in groups since a mass of mini-billboards both strengthens the resolve of the overall message and offers a broader range of reinforcing messages, whereas a lone picket sign can compromise a cause. A single message can always be conveniently attributed to a lone dissenter and appear to lack collective sponsorship. Also, a lone sign must bare the weight of communicating a complex set of purposes and resolves, whereas a collective of signs demonstrates unity of feeling and allows for both repetition of key messages and nuance; variety has a greater chance of resonating with an audience since sheer numbers reinforce the overall message and increase the likelihood that viewers take away the intended interpretation. A range of messages also creates a larger narrative and offers viewer options, which means a particular sign may prove persuasive, or at least give pause. Of course, for those who stridently opposed the strike, the range of messages no doubt infuriated an audience who already perceived the striker’s purpose as unjust, which means the target audience would be narrowed to those who were vacillating or teasing with the notion of changing sides, or at least seeing a larger picture. For other picketers and those who already supported the sit-down and the 82 workers’ motives, picket signs condensed the strike’s purpose and desired outcomes to their most concise articulation. The written circulation of key messages within the ranks offered one more way to reaffirm the actions already taking place. The explicit goal for the strikers was union recognition since collective bargaining was the only way workers felt they could gain a foothold in challenging and changing abhorrent working conditions. For Genora Johnson, picket signs offered a message site to reaffirm and expand the strike’s propaganda. Genora Johnson ultimately delegated sign painting to Bruce Sloan, one of her friends from the Socialist Party who was a professional sign painter (Dollinger Interview 12). She moved on to proactively react to another need she identified – that of aiding and protecting the men by forming a militant offshoot of the Women’s Auxiliary called the Women’s Emergency Brigade. This initially six-member cooperative consisted of Genora and five lieutenants she selected, and these women swore to protect the strikers at any cost, including their own lives. All members had to swear to protect and defend the strikers, continuing to battle even if one of their cohorts went down in gunfire. In organizing the Emergency Brigade, Genora demonstrated self-awareness in capitalizing on the power of the female body, and the results extended the public relations reach for both the strikers and the women. The idea for the Emergency Brigade arose from the January 11 th success of what came to be known as the Battle of Bull’s Run, a battle won primarily thanks to the women who responded to Genora’s pleas over the sound car to stream down among the police outside Fisher No. 2, turning what looked to be sure defeat into a defining win for the strikers. The surge of women down the hill and past the police to 83 the gates of Fisher No. 2 would have forced the police to shoot unarmed women in the back to continue the battle, and even in a town as staunchly pro-GM and resistantly anti-union as Flint, this would have clearly generated their own problematic PR. The ability to create police resistance was a feat considering the anti- union, pro-force sentiment in Flint. The women capitalized on the politics of being female to create union victory for the Battle of Bull’s Run, and the initial success of this impromptu strategy led to Genora’s formalized creation of the Women’s Emergency Brigade to leverage this successful new strategy born of a moment’s improvisation. The women who were already on the frontlines in food preparation and strike advocacy literalized that position by acting as a buffer for the male strikers, who lacked the same persuasive politics of the body. The Emergency Brigade offered a continuum that sustained the success of the Battle of Bull’s Run. Moreover, the empowerment the women felt from contributing to the success at Bull’s Run was its own recruiting force as the women sought to capitalize on the exhilarating power they had gained and pledged to defend the strikers even in the face of bloodshed. The Women’s Auxiliary was not officially formed until January 18 with elections and the first meeting being held on January 19. Prior to this, two women’s groups had been operating, but neither with formal recognition. The strike kitchen headed by Dorothy Kraus and Hazel Simons was primarily led by Communist Party members and sympathizers while its dominantly Socialist Party counterpart, primarily led by Genora Johnson, operated out of union headquarters at Pengelly Hall. The differential in locale automatically put the Socialist faction more in tune with day-to- day strike operations since this group was not kitchen-based and therefore wasn’t 84 operationally wedded to the sit-downers’ regulated mealtimes. Without such strictly regulated events structuring their day, the Socialist group engaged more freely and actively in less traditional female activities, such as advocacy, sign painting, and defense. The culmination of their advocacy was Genora’s official formation of the Women’s Emergency Brigade. The Brigade not only secured the strikers’ win at the Battle of Running Bulls but should be credited with the success of the Plant 4 takeover. Genora and her lieutenants strung themselves across the Plant 4 gates, forestalling the police long enough for the workers to secure the plant as a sit-down site. These two groups of women mirrored the ideologies of their parties, and both sets of politics played active, if not often factionalizing, roles in the strike. Socialist Party members, while the numeric minority, were more militant and prone to outspokenness and risk-taking whereas Communist Party members tended to align with exigent powers, such as Michigan Governor Frank Murphy and President Roosevelt. In broad strokes, the Communist Party tended to work for change within the existing system, a system which ultimately disavowed them but from which they sought approval, while the Socialist Party group was generally less concerned about sanctioning from public figures, tended to be more focused on the needs of the masses, and were more overt about their disapproval of the current status quo and consequently, more vocal about their opinions and demands. While never argued before, the two women’s organizations – the Communist Party-led strike kitchen versus the Socialist Party-led Women’s Emergency Brigade – followed party lines to this extent. 85 Most narratives about women’s participation in the Flint strikes have been excluded from, or marginalized in, male-authored histories, leaving them relegated to archival oral histories, diaries, letters, or simply lost or vanishing over time as participants have passed away. One such narrative that nuances female participation involves the politics and performance of footwear. Dorothy Kraus and her Communist Party cohorts offered Auxiliary members sheep-lined boots if they agreed to abide by Communist party lines, which was to focus on kitchen duty and on garnering sympathy instead of being militant. This buy-off strategy actually creates a visual marker in exigent photographs from the time since those with matching low- heeled warm boots were content to observe the protocol. Like many women of the time, Genora Johnson only had one pair of worn high heels that she lined with playing cards since the soles were worn through in places, and she too was offered the sheep-lined booties in exchange for being “reasonable” (Dollinger Interview 34). However, Johnson notes the buy-off held no personal appeal. Given that fully half of the 1,000 member Auxiliary signed up for the Emergency Brigade, Genora was clearly not alone in working for the greater good or wanting to push past food preparation as a sole form of strike contribution over the tempting, but short-lived, offering of sheep-lined boots. The appeal to materiality through fashion and warmth on the side of the Kraus contingent points to dissent within the two factions and attempted sabotage on the side of the Communists. Genora Johnson also organized a Women’s Day on February 3, 1937, the same day the second injunction to dispel the strikers from the plants was supposed to be executed. After the formation of the Flint Women’s Auxiliary, women in 86 neighboring Michigan cities followed Flint’s lead and formed their own auxiliaries and emergency brigades; on Women’s Day, women from nearby Saginaw, Detroit, and other surrounding cities arrived to support their Flint cohorts and picket the execution of the injunction and the removal of the strikers. Exigent photos of the Detroit Women’s Auxiliary show their supporters carrying picket signs with two different messages - “We Are Against Violence” and “Equal Pay for Men & Women for the Same Work.” The anti-violence signage is undoubtedly a response to charges that the Women’s Emergency Brigade stirred violence. Both female and male strike participants had to be careful not to instigate violence, even though violence was enacted against them by GM and others, although thanks to Michigan’s Governor Frank Murphy, vigilantism was minimized since the governor shared the picket sign sentiment of opposing violence. The authorship of these two picket sign messages is unknown, but given the group’s Detroit residency, it was likely not Genora Johnson. However, Genora’s lack of input on these signs only heightens the overall argument for the rising sense of self-awareness these women gained as a by-product of the strike since the second sign in particular, “Equal Pay for Men & Women for the Same Work,” outwardly demonstrates that by February 3 rd , the overall mindset of women involved with the strike, even peripherally, had widened to a larger sense of purpose. Like their male counterparts behind plant walls, the women had banded together for improved treatment and were motivated and empowered to strive for larger goals than providing three hot meals a day to the strikers, goals that moved outside of the immediate concerns of the strike and addressed gendered workplace injustice, making the strike 87 setting an incubator for seedlings of other issues worthy of dissent. The union offered a space for communication, problem sharing, and communion, and the strike brought together female supporters whose own new community instigated conversations that led to broader shared demands that uniquely addressed gender-specific injustices. Imbalanced wages were another GM-imposed inequality that helped the bottom line since female workers required less financial output and therefore contributed to greater corporate profit margins. As a companion event on Women’s Day, Johnson had the idea of organizing children’s picket lines, 7 which she made material by writing the slogans and painting all of the signs (Dollinger Interview 14). With the abundance of women in Flint for Women’s Day, many of them mothers, the children’s picket lines simply organized and provided an outlet for children already in attendance. Images of this procession show kids ranging from toddlers to teens carrying a variety of picket signs centering around the themes of supporting striking fathers and improving family life through union victory – “Give Us a Chance for Better Food and a Better Life,” “We’re Behind Our Dads 100%,” “My Daddy is a Union Man,” and “Our Dads Will Win! Join the Union.” In the case of children, belief in position is certainly less relevant in holding a picket sign. One could rightfully question the comprehension level of Kermit and 7 In Genora’s oral interview, she specifically says children’s picket lines, not Children’s Parade (Dollinger Interview 14). This event has been popularly renamed as the Children’s Parade in all writings about the strike, which erases Genora’s intentions as the organizer; her focus was on the strike as the impetus for the demonstration, not just a cute gathering of kids. In an attempt to restore Genora’s terminology and intent, I will abandon the revised historical term and use her preferred term of children’s picket lines. This collective renaming with the emphasis on “parade” also erases the potential for political action in children by framing them as unaware innocents when many of the “children” in the demonstration, such as Genora’s 16-year old sister, Barbara, were teenagers, not toddlers like her son Jarvis. In fact, Barbara was a member of the Emergency Brigade, so the resistance to politicizing “children” and the automatic descriptor of “child” to anyone under 18 strips them of the recognition for activism and bravery many of them in fact showed over the course of the strike. 88 Genora’s two-year old son, Jarvis, his small frame clutching a “My Daddy Strikes for Us Little Tykes – On To Victory” sign, yet a picture of him holding this sign at the front of the children’s picket line proved resonant. This image gained national and international recognition through reproduction in varying newspapers, ultimately becoming an iconic strike image, and Genora’s picket signs became strike narratives, suggesting the power of personalization and familial integration with union goals. Both the picket signs and the appearance of the children marching in front of the plants their fathers or relatives occupied personalized the strike and humanized the sit-downers, turning the easy label of dissenters into a more complex picture of fathers striving to provide a better life for their families. The ideology of children’s picket lines opposes Hazel Simons’ philosophy of banning union or strike talk around the children in that it represents a full integration of the union and family life and demonstrates the direct correlation between the primary wage earner’s standard of living and that of the larger family unit, a correlation that is only heightened by the ragtag army of children, and the pathos elicited by several who appear gloveless and without sufficient clothing against Michigan’s fierce February weather. Given the large number of children in the picture as well as those beyond its frame, many mothers clearly volunteered their children as picket line participants, suggesting a recognition that aligned the success of the strike with the greater good of the family, a connection that was encouraged and made explicit by some absent sit-downing fathers. A letter from one Chevy 4 sit-downer to his wife affirms, “Tell Larry and Suzanne that when we get home I will have more time to play together as I will not have to work so hard or long. Love, Harold” (qtd. in 89 Fuoss 110). Harold’s comment to his children links his short-term absence to a long- term gain, that of spending more time together as a family. It also reflects his recognition and associated guilt that the compounded exhaustion of superhuman workdays mean he’s had to repeatedly refuse his children’s pleas to play. The toll of work extends beyond economic status to family life and loops back to “the shakes” where exhausted workers couldn’t stop performing their labor even after their shift ended due to the sustained intensity of their workpace. Such after-hours effects certainly didn’t leave workers capable of coming home to romp with their children. Interestingly, Harold writes “when we get home,” forefronting both his loyalty to the strike and the loyalty felt among the group of sit-downers as well as the recognition that sticking together for the duration of the strike is the only way to achieve the desired outcome of unionization. This will in turn fulfill his desire for more quality time with Larry and Suzanne since the union will have the leverage to bargain with GM over working conditions, hours, and financial compensation. Such leverage was unavailable to the individual workers, particularly at the height of the Depression when so-deemed lackluster performers or aging employees who could no longer “keep up” were continually threatened with replacement, or simply replaced. Foremen often pointed to or referenced the always-gathered masses outside the plants waiting for employment as a veiled threat to keep up and to squelch complaints (Dollinger Interview 4). The Plant 9/Plant 4 ruse of appearing to sit-down in Plant 9, a site for manufacturing ball bearings, while actually securing Plant 4, the sole manufacturing site for Chevrolet engines, was masterminded by Genora’s husband and fellow 90 Socialist Party member Kermit Johnson. Kermit worked at Plant 4 and was the only one with a detailed knowledge of all of the plant’s entrance points. This plan was deemed too risky by Communist Party strike leaders, such as Bud Simons and Henry Kraus as well as Walter Reuther, who was influential during the sit-down and went on to serve a 24-year tenure (1946-70) as president of the UAW. While Walter Reuther was a member of the Socialist Party at the time, strategy-wise he sided with the more conservative Communist Party. Genora Johnson realized Reuther would only be swayed by higher-ups in the Socialist Party, so she contacted Norman Thomas, president of the Socialist Party, who then sent Frank Trager, National Labor Secretary for the Socialist Party to Flint to evaluate the Plant 4 strategy and serve as mediator (Dollinger Interview 26). Genora’s bold decision to write to the president of the Socialist Party and expect results, which she did in fact get, speaks voluminously about her perseverance. Trager 8 did come to Flint and based his decision not on factionalizing leaderships but on interviews with and the sentiments of the mass numbers of sit-downers. The rank and file had already fought so much and feared losing what they had gained. Since Plant 4 was the sole manufacturing location for Chevrolet engines (Fine 266), capturing that plant would undoubtedly weaken General Motors’ anti-union stance and their will to outlast the strikers was likely to weaken when production was virtually halted. Thanks to Trager’s mediating influence, the Plant 4 ruse was agreed upon. Much like the Battle of the Running Bulls, the success of this pivotal strike event was 8 Interestingly, Sidney Fine never mentions Frank Trager in his history of the strike, and the backstory of high-level Socialist Party involvement in the Plant 9 decision was gleaned the oral interview with Genora Johnson. In fact, the Plant 9/Plant 4 ruse is commonly attributed to Roy Reuther and Bob Travis, both of whom helped execute the plan but neither of whom originally conceived it. 91 also due to the foresight of women and the now-formalized Emergency Brigade. Plant 4 was nearly secure by the time GM’s hired force and the local police figured out that Plant 4, not Plant 9, was the actual sit-down target. As part of the ruse, the Women’s Emergency Brigade was on duty at the Plant 9 scene, but Genora and her lieutenants broke away from the fray to rush to Plant 4 where five of them stretched themselves across the Plant 4 gate. With their hands clasped together, making a human chain in front of the chainlink fence, they became performers, a sacrificial troupe, staging a dare to the arriving police 9 . The women’s physical barrier was augmented by a rhetorical barrage of ethical and pathetic appeals to the officers that verbally solicited an empathic visualization by asking the officers to imagine themselves as the strikers and asking if they too wouldn’t fight to secure a better life for their families. This performance and the police’s apprehension at instigating physical violence against women, particularly unarmed women, a near certainty the Women’s Emergency Brigade had learned to leverage, forestalled the police long enough to allow the would-be Plant 4 takeover to become a secured reality. This incident literalized the strike’s inside/outside dynamics in the sense that the men scrambling to secure the plant and expand the sit-down performance arena were hidden from view in what would become their new domestic space. The women were the external defense system, exposed to and ready for the raw potential for physical violence. Genora Johnson notes that the women who signed up for the Emergency Brigade had to commit to valiance in the face of danger. Even though the police hadn’t yet used 9 Police at this time were called flatfeet, bulls or cops by the strike community, thus the Battle of Running Bulls on January 11 th in fact referred to the police fleeing the scene when the strikers won (Dollinger Interview 19). 92 violence against women (and never did during the strike), that was certainly not dismissed as a distinct possibility. Genora notes she intentionally intensified descriptions of Brigade risks to discourage bandwagon participants, telling the women, “If the cops come out and start shooting or throwing tear gas or clubbing, you stand at your post of duty. You do not move, and if your sister beside you goes down in a pool of blood, you do not get hysterical” (Dollinger Interview 19). Genora’s attempts at gruesome verisimilitude perhaps only heightened the romantic draw possible participants felt. The potentially necessary tasks were the next threshold on their new immersion outside of the home. Either way, a trajectory of female radicalness emerged over the course of the strike. Some women, like Genora Johnson, were already untraditional, largely thanks to her exposure to and involvement in the Socialist Party, and the strike simply provided a canvas for them to expand an already inculcated activism due to the marginal presence of men. For the majority of women, the strike led to an awareness of self- actualization, a process they were made aware of through the politics of performance. They emerged from the private, accepted role of domestic homemaker where they served their individual families to engaging in public food preparation for a population not defined by familial bloodlines. For many women, their public roles expanded as the strike continued, and they felt more empowered and confident, a confidence that led them to join the Emergency Brigade. The Brigade offered an outlet for activism that went beyond kitchen duty, first aid, and childcare. Again, this is not to marginalize the women who didn’t sign up for the Emergency Brigade. Even 93 serving on kitchen duty was an act of bravery considering the popular opposition to the strikers and such work necessitated breaking from one’s comfort zone. Most of the female participants were young wives in their early twenties, and the strike’s date of 1936-37 means the battle for women’s suffrage pre-dated their historical memory, so for many, their first experience with feminist activism was the participation and performance thrust upon them by the strike. The few fragmented women’s narratives we have today are marked by wonder, individual accomplishment, and collective achievement. In The Flint Auto Worker, Women’s Day marcher Emma Brigadier speaks of her participation: “I was with FIVE HUNDRED UNION WOMEN…And what a huge shivery thrill it was—showing those thousands of Flint residents lined up on the sidewalks that we were 500 strong—500 of us willing to fight anybody in defense of our men and homes!” (2). Brigadier contextualizes her efforts in terms of both home and husband, making dual- pronged desire a stronger motivator for success. Genora Johnson summarizes the attitude of the strikers in noting, “All of the creative things that workers come up with in a strike are usually original, because it pertains to the situation you are in right at that moment” (Dollinger Automatic 150). While Genora is speaking specifically about the strikers and how circumstance breeds originality, the same could be said for the strike’s female activists. In addition to union representatives and supporters coming in and out of Flint, these women continually represented the strikers in an to the larger community and used performance as a tool for spreading pro-strike rhetoric in response to GM’s corporate dogma. 94 The Strike Marches On as It Ceases Quite circumstantially given the chronic indeterminacy of the sit-down, the strike’s fin de siecle ended up being the performance of a play entitled Strike Marches On, which was coauthored by three women: labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, writer and proletarian novelist Josephine Herbst, and Dorothy Kraus, the head of the strike kitchen and wife of Henry Kraus, editor of The Flint Auto Worker. Strike Marches On had already been scheduled for an 8 pm performance on February 11, 1937 at Flint’s UAW union headquarters, Pengelly Hall. When the performance date turned out to coincide with the strike’s success, termination, and plant evacuations, it was slotted into the celebratory program of speeches and festivities. The play was the final event on the evening’s roster, making its sole performance a capstone event seething with symbolism after a swath of victory speeches by everyone from UAW president Homer Martin to ILGWU vice-president and labor organizer Rose Pesotta. The Strike Marches On not only reinforced the night’s motivating messages of triumph but translated them into a new form as volunteer striker-actors re-presented in brief the expanded lifecycle of the strike from the seedlings of its motivation to its ultimate success. Since the play was authored during the final days of the strike, it did not specify how or when victory would be achieved. Nonetheless, it did anticipate and affirm the strike’s ultimate success and envisioned it as a necessary outcome of local to global unity. In both contemporary promotional materials and the few brief, scattered references to it in critical sources, the play was most commonly referred to as a pageant or living newspaper. In his book on the Federal Theatre Project in the Midwest, Paul Sporn differentiates between these two similar performance types; a 95 living newspaper’s purpose is “weaving newspaper headlines and experimental stage techniques into dramatic presentations of current political and social issues” whereas pageants are “primarily intended to celebrate local events of historical or traditional significance, tending toward patriotic oversimplification” (47). The lone production of Strike Marches On contained elements of both dramatic techniques, forming a hybrid model of theatre that accounts for the lack of consistent naming convention. Like a pageant, Strike Marches On focused on a local event of importance, but instead of reflecting on a historical event, it projected historical significance on to a current event and rebranded patriotism as workers standing up for their rights, offering an initial site of historical documentation. However, the play also bore characteristics of a living newspaper in that the subject matter of the sit-down was rife with up-to-the-minute political and social overtones. The prophecy of success within the play depended on the doctrine of collective unity, but due to its performance timing, also the message also commemorated the success and cessation of the strike as well as the immediate vow to march on for continued union rights. Beyond this, the production visually traced the strike’s rationale as well as recent historical highpoints of strike success, and the open ending implied that the successful unionization of Flint’s strikers would ripple outwards to encompass the world. At the same time the play prophesied that outcome, it became a celebration of that success. While global reverberation may sound a bit lofty and far-fetched, this imagined community was not wildly idealistic. The strikers had garnered national and international news coverage, much of which was more sympathetic and less corporate-biased than the local papers. The length of the sit- 96 down and the attempt by workers to overthrow a giant like GM were of such magnitude that the world’s eyes were indeed fixed on Flint as the strike nexus. To return to the chapter’s argument, one by-product of the Flint strike was a transformation of traditional gender roles, most dominantly the privatizing domesticity of the sit-down male population behind plant walls and the public advocacy and defense by its female supporters who came out of the homes and to the front of the plants. Women who joined the strike effort to support their male counterparts were presented with or found opportunities to support the strike. The sense of self-enrichment and participation in a female coalition and collective power were unexpected by-products. The Strike Marches On diversifies this profile even more as it was collaboratively coauthored by three women: labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, proletarian novelist Josephine Herbst, and local participant Dorothy Kraus. In fact, this triplicate coauthorship is really the narrowest version of authorial naming. The workers who performed in the play filled out the admittedly skeletal script with personal experience, adding verisimilitude while minimizing fears associated with the stage and acting. Most of those involved were encouraged to simply present their experiences, making the script a baseline for actor ideation that simply established a foundational order of events. In her book on female coauthors, Holly Laird focuses on famous coauthors with lasting writing relationships where at least one of the pair was a woman. Beyond that, Laird defines coauthorship as two people and notes she “did not discover important third parties to the ongoing literary collaborations discussed in this book” (10). In fact, nontraditional texts like Strike Marches On greatly expand Laird’s notion of coauthorship as a two-person 97 relationship. In the case of Strike Marches On, the coauthor writing relationship was both circumstantial and impermanent, a one-time event evolving out of temporary social and political conditions. Similarly to Laird, authors who don’t coauthor with famous males remain noncanonical, or in my case, beyond invisible and bound to the archives, especially given the play was not fully scripted, making it a skeleton that relied on the actors for fleshing out. The three coauthors’ willingness to create this kind of script acknowledged and forefronted the fact that worker-actors would better know what to say through their lived experience than the writers as professionals. Such a unique script is distinctly anti-patriarchal in letting go of authorial authority and the need to control and determine the actor’s words. It also posits coauthorship as a collaborative space that allows authors to feel comfortable extending the writing partnership to an unknown worker-actor who could productively fill in their own lived experience as opposed to reciting a second-hand version of those experiences. The final exigent draft has seven written on-stage parts and a total of 18 speaking parts 10 , including audience participation and a loudspeaker that acts as narrator, all of which encouraged ad libbing. However, there were 80 actors in the production according to the director’s count (Watson 5), although Henry Kraus volumizes this number to 200 11 (Kraus 249). Be it 80, 200 or somewhere in the middle, two things are clear: there was ultimately a great interest in participating in 10 These numbers are derived from my own script count. Many of the speaking parts were off-stage, such as a telephone operator’s voice and a voice needed for a radio announcement. As noted, only seven parts called for on-stage appearance, and the director notes that the initial draft was only a description and ordering of the requisite scenes with no dialogue (Watson 5). The final draft includes some dialogue so is actually a transcription or version of the original words workers attached to their roles, thereby enlarging the boundaries of coauthorship and collaboration. 11 Henry Kraus’ book, The Many and the Few, was published 10 years after the strike and largely relied on personal memory. Kraus is knowingly prone to exaggeration, so his 200-person estimate is likely overblown. 98 the play, and the quantity of writing and named roles in comparison to the actual production was nominal to say the least. In his brief, one-paragraph mention of Strike Marches On, Paul Sporn makes the arrival of Morris Watson, head of the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) New York Living Newspaper division, seem like a saving grace for a sinking ship as Watson quickly wrangles everything into production mode and brings order to the chaos (291). In the process, Sporn diminishes the role of the three women from creators and coauthors to something akin to mother hens who needed a man to come in and save the day when the circumstances of the strike had proved anything but that. Sporn fails to mention Watson’s presence in Flint was circumstantial as he was there to give a lecture and had two open days in his schedule after a speaking engagement in nearby Lansing. Consequently, Watson agreed to Vorse and Herbst’s request to direct the play, although he notes, “It was with some misgivings that I undertook the job. Two days to whip up a show with a cast of 80 amateurs!” (his emphasis, Watson 5). The presence of a leading FTP official from New York brought a level of credibility and professionalism to the performance. This is not to say the performance wouldn’t have happened without Watson’s intervention since the script was already in process and a production date had been established before his arrival. In writing about female coauthorship, Laird notes, “coauthorship depends as much on the conversations that precede and surround writing as on the writing itself” (8). None of the works Laird addresses are plays, so her texts are more terminal than continued works in progress that extended the conversations of collaboration. In the case of a fluid text like Strike Marches On, which only initially existed as an outline 99 that defined the overall arc of dramatic action, the conversations that post-dated the writing during rehearsal actually represent the bulk of the writing process. Coauthorship extended broadly to the worker-actors, making any notion of a final version impossible since such a process explicitly resists a definitive final version and leaves textual openings for of-the-moment performance inspirations, additions, or changes. Those conversations get translated to an improvisational opportunity within the performance that creates an even more hybrid experience; the audience doesn’t know which words are the playwright’s and which spaces were created to allow individual coauthorship with the selected worker-actor. The entire dramatic process was incredibly compressed as the play was produced and staged in a three-day period with only a narrow writing window prior to that. Mary Heaton Vorse was in Flint as a labor journalist and notes the dramatic genesis came from the February 1 st Chevy 4 takeover victory, worked back to include the sit-down as a whole, then added the context of the speed-up to establish cause for the strike (Vorse, Flint Notes 20). The Chevy 4 takeover occurred on February 1 st , leaving only 8 days between Vorse’s idea and the start of the 3-day production period. Director Morris Watson notes his misgivings that the script consisted solely of scene descriptions and relied entirely on improvisational worker-generated content for realization and execution. Watson’s concerns, however, proved unfounded. In an article about his experiences directing the play, which was published in the April 1937 issue of New Theatre & Film, Watson pauses to affirm and reestablish source material for potentially unbelieving readers, “It must be remembered here that these lines were not given to the workers. The only thing I told them was where to stand on 100 the stage. I was bowled over by the fact that a group of workers placed upon a stage and told to tell their story could and did tell it with vigor and directness” (5). Watson both confirms the instincts of Vorse, Herbst and Kraus in turning over authorial reins to the worker-actors and expresses his amazement that such a plan should work, suggesting his own biased orientation towards compartmentalization and pigeon- holing as a theatre professional, even as part of the Federal Theatre Project. Of course, for workers who had been participating in a ground-breaking strike that no one thought possible, their ability to perform, particularly their own jobs, should perhaps not have been so shocking. Interestingly, Watson calls them workers, not actors, forefronting a continued resistance to labeling workers as qualified actors and merging them with a larger and more exclusively recognized dramatic fold, even as he’s expressing astonishment about their abilities, abilities one suspects theatre professionals would not have been capable of on the spot in that such roles specifically relied on worker-actor knowledge of their jobs. One female cast member in Strike Marches On documented her experiences in a letter to her sit-downer husband, “My Dear Clarence, I suppose you are glad you don’t have to listen to me say my part in the play. I have it all learned. I am real proud.” (qtd. in Fuoss 12 77). The loving greeting of “My Dear Clarence” is quickly caveated with her supposition that he’s probably glad not to have to witness her perform, which serves as a thinly veiled desire for rebuttal and approval. Her cautious language suggests an awareness her activity may be viewed as frivolous and that this new form of “performance” outside of the scope of her pre-strike, housewife life 12 Fuoss simply cites the quote from the letter without elaborating or saying anything about it. 101 might be perceived negatively. However, she goes on to position herself in the role of good student in learning her part (not mentioning she undoubtedly helped craft and those very lines), suggesting she’s following orders. She builds up to her final statement and the bold claim that she is proud of herself, a pride she would clearly like her husband to share but one that exists irrespective of his validation. Her decision to perform in the play, take it seriously, and feel and exhibit self-worth demonstrates a sense of empowerment derived from participating in the strike and a heavily female strike-support community. Of course, Clarence probably did see his wife perform given the strike success and plant evacuation, offering him a moment with the raw materials to re-envision her and her range of capabilities. The play stands as a pinnacle moment in the sense that it was already recasting history, in some cases history only 10 days old, such as the takeover of Chevy 4, as it was celebrating the strike’s success. The play provided a point of identification in pinpointing pivotal strike moments to intensify a message that affirmed unification as a tool for transformation. The play in its ideation and initial rehearsals served as a historical recap that contextualized the strike’s purpose and highlighted key events to sustain the strike’s momentum as a positive reinforcement of collective achievement. The fact the strike was favorably resolved for the sit- downers in the play’s mayfly length three-day production lifespan invariably altered the play’s perceptions, if not its purpose, as it became a culminating crescendo capstone that reflected on the rewards of righteous motivation carried out by a group of adherents. Whether pre- or post-strike settlement, the play was a transmission tool that served as an alternative media source that captured and recast the strike and its 102 events from an insider’s point of view that placed the power of change with the worker. Given that neither the strike’s originating impulses nor its chronology would have been unfamiliar to the audience of unionists and union sympathizers, the play clearly served a purpose that was not purely historical, conversion-oriented or informational. In fact, the radical nature of the play is its culminating utopic vision of a world united in solidarity through the reiteration of the possibilities of collective action unruptured by selfish individualism; the process for creating the play embodied those very principles. The play’s affirmation of unionization and its coincidental dovetailing with the strike’s conclusion undoubtedly heightened the sense of the limitless bounds of collaborative success. In writing about the spirit of success as the plants were evacuated and the sit- downers and their supporters traveled en masse to Pengelly Hall where they would see the single performance of Strike Marches On, Vorse writes, “For a moment fear was dead!” (Vorse Flint Notes 21). As a labor journalist, Vorse, while enraptured by the spirit of the moment and the triumph of the strikers, also clearly recognizes the inherent transitoriness of it, making the production of Strikes Marches On even more important at this critical, short-lived juncture of glory. The temporary erasure of fear created a potent, responsive setting for the play’s message about the rewards of collectivism and cooperation. In her notes about the day’s events, Vorse expects no one to be at the union hall due to the procession out of the plants and through town but instead finds herself having to climb up the fire escape in a desperate measure to reach the cast, then set up a loud speaker for the gathered masses outside (Flint Notes 103 21), which actually turned the performance into an audio-experienced radio play for a portion of the gathered masses. The play starts with a percussive speed-up symbolizing the increasingly frenzied assembly line workpace from 1928 to the present, which left workers as ghostly performers and victims of “the shakes.” Watson notes the worker voicing the Loudspeaker (the name commonly used in living newspaper productions for what was commonly a narrator) narrated the speed-up changes in his own words, associating each two-year increment with a new phase, such as “1930 – notice the slight speed-up” (5). While Watson doesn’t describe the worker who volunteered for this role, it must have been a seasoned assembly line worker who had the knowledge to incrementally describe the degradation in line conditions from 1928-1936. The play’s actual dialogue begins with a confrontation between a foreman and a worker regarding the worker’s visibly displayed union button. While Atlanta is not specifically named, starting with this incident would have been transparent for the audience and demonstrates the play’s historical awareness and nod to Atlanta’s role as a significant catalyst for the larger strike. On November 18, 1936, Atlanta Fisher Body workers went on strike to prevent the layoff of a few workers for wearing union buttons inside the factory (Fine 134). This action was supported by other plants, ultimately triggering a domino of GM strikes with its nexus in Flint. The foreman starts with the rhetorically obvious by asking “What’s that?,” implying a gesture at the union button. The worker defies expectation by not wavering with an apologetic stance or an attempt to deny or cover the obvious but instead confronts the question as ludicrous. He instead takes verbal control of the conversation with a civilized retort 104 of “You know what it is.” The foreman persists in attempting to assert hierarchical workplace authority with the order, “You tell me,” to which the worker once again strips off the false pretenses of the whole conversation by replying, “I don’t have to, you’ve got fellows who can tell you,” referring to the abundance of GM labor spies who reported on any union activity. The dialogue makes the finger-pointing foreman appear loutish with unrefined phrasing like “You tell me.” The offending worker fails to apologize for union affiliation, and while his brashness may have been exaggerated, viewers could hardly have felt that to be true on the night the play was performed given the immediacy of their success, a success that stemmed from chance-taking. The worker is fired at the end of the one-page scene as an exemplary warning to other union hopefuls when the foreman blatantly announces, “We haven’t any room for union fellows here,” returning us to Chaplin’s public assembly line reprimand from his foreman in Modern Times that also had the larger purpose of keeping everyone else in line (Vorse, Herbst, and Kraus 1 13 ). However, firing as forewarning for a larger worker population backfires when this layoff sparks the decision to strike as recourse in the next scene. The symbolic trigger of the union button was to take on even greater significance two days later on February 13 when GM officially agreed as part of the negotiations that workers could wear union insignia on company property (Fine 305). In his autobiography, Wyndham Mortimer, an autoworker who rose to UAW vice- president and signed the first GM-UAW agreement on behalf of the union, notes the union button debate was one of the final issues in the strike negotiations. Mortimer 13 All of the quotes in this paragraph come from page one of Strike Marches On. 105 notes that a sort of kinship evolved between him and William Knudsen, executive vice-president of GM, as the only two people with actual experience in the auto industry. Mortimer remembers Knudsen nudging him and pointing out everyone else at the bargaining table were lawyers or coal miners, referring to John L. Lewis, coal miner turned head of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the CIO (Mortimer 136). While strike songs equally demonize Knudsen and Sloan, GM’s president, Mortimer nuances this cookie cutter portrayal in describing Knudsen as a practical man more interested in reanimating auto production than combing through strike debates. The day before the strike was settled, Mortimer recalls Knudsen finally crying out, “Mr. Mortimer, let your people wear a button, ten buttons, a hundred buttons, a thousand buttons. I don’t care a damn. Let us get back to making automobiles” (139). Corporate allowance of the union button as visual cue, one that in some ways started the strike, was in fact a momentous concession for GM since it, intentionally or not, validated the workers’ original position in both Atlanta’s Fisher Body and as portrayed in Strike Marches On. Allowing workers to visually perform union membership validated union membership as a worker right. The wearing of the union button was in fact immortalized in a strike song called “Put on Your Old Union Button” in which the workers sang, “Don’t be afraid to show it / Let your friends all know it / By its sign / All workers will be free / And when the struggle’s over / We’ll be in the clover / Bargaining collectively” (“Put On”). In the song, wearing the button is associated with communal pride and being in the “clover” from the achievement of collective bargaining. In reality, it made any workers who might have still been tentative about the repercussions of union membership feel more secure since one 106 could visually identify those who shared membership. The rising numbers of union insignia cultivated a stronger sense of community and provided the security of knowing a larger organization represented one’s individual needs. On the part of GM, their resistance to the visual symbol of the button when they had already conceded to recognition of the union may seem strange, but GM undoubtedly hoped the union would fizzle, an outcome that would be easier to facilitate if workers weren’t proudly sporting union buttons, keeping the union a secret workers still needed to discuss in hushed tones. The Strike Marches On capitalizes on spectatorship as the most efficient conversion tool for the masses because it allows for visual access, and staging a play allows for casting a wider net of immediacy as well as the collective experience of theatregoing where the sympathies of the audience interplay with individual experience. Reading a newspaper article on the strike is, in contrast, a solo experience. Being part of an audience, particularly the one at Pengelly Hall where hundreds and thousands were crammed into and around the union hall, created a network so strong, extensive and unbreakable that it probably felt impenetrable by GM. One feels the worker-actors strain to achieve an almost religious, evangelical overtone and coherence of support. The play ends with an enactment of ripple thinking that begins with the microcosm of Pengelly Hall and undulates out. The assembly line transforms into a throughline that unites the nation and ultimately, the world, making the strike something much larger and more powerful than itself as a point of origin. The play ends by naming those who watch, and then those named form a global community choir to sing “Solidarity Forever.” The play’s naming 107 conventions are a reverse genetics that start with the species name and widen back to incorporate the trunk of the family tree. The naming moves from the plant-level (“Cadillac here, Chrysler here. Dodge is ready.”) to the cities that watch (“Atlanta is watching. Detroit, Toledo”), then states (“California is watching.”) and countries (“England. France. Spain.”) before ending with the world (“The world says, ‘Watching.’”) (Vorse, Herbst, and Kraus 10). Based on the call and response form, the plant-level is the only one that could have actively participated since the named auto manufacturer workers who responded on behalf of their company’s name could have call out “here” as if raising their hands and responding to an imaginary roll call. Dodge’s affirmation of “ready” suggests the role of accomplice, not just a passive observer siding with labor after viewing gross injustice. This theatrical partnership reflects actual strike conditions since the GM strikers relied on non-striking autoworkers from other automakers, such as Buick and Chrysler, as well as other industries. Flint’s bus workers were also on strike and agreed to played the police in Strike Marches On, suggesting no one participating in the strike wanted to play the role of one trying to destroy the strike. These supporters from across industries and cities packed the picket line and added a defensive presence at times of red alert threat levels, such as when the strikers were due to be evacuated at various points. More broadly, the active role shouted out by each auto manufacturer suggests the inevitability of unionization sweeping the auto industry as the support Cadillac and Chrysler show now will be reciprocated by GM workers when roles are reversed, and in fact, Chrysler was to be organized the following month in March 1937. The listed cities are not arbitrarily chronicled (“Atlanta is 108 watching. Detroit, Toledo”), but each had a significant stake in the outcome of the strike. The words “Atlanta is watching” undoubtedly captured the mood of that city as Atlanta’s Fisher Body was the first plant in the GM family to sit-down in November 1936 to prevent those workers who had worn union buttons from being laid off (Fine 134), and while the specific strike may have been called impetuously and prematurely, the ability to sustain it and then spread it nationally provided evidence of the ability to garner union solidarity and the potential for the solidarity against a wrong in one city to translate to a wider movement and a national sit-down. In the play, Detroit is the second city to be called out, and its status as a major auto manufacturing center and its proximity to Flint made it a natural affiliate. The success in achieving UAW recognition in the bevy of brief sit-downs by auto industry affiliates in Detroit in December 1936 contributed to a mood of success entering the major phase of the GM sit-down. Toledo was the third city in the ripple of nationally cited examples of watching, and the Toledo Chevrolet plant had gone down on January 4 th (Fine 146). Toledo was also a symbolic reference in terms of representing Ohio, and earlier in 1936, in Akron, Ohio, Goodyear tire workers had staged a sit- down to achieve recognition by the United Rubber Workers. The auto workers’ sit- down was the longest since the tire workers’ 31-day sit-down, and the success of the UAW was a significant step towards a vertical closed shop across the auto industry with Goodyear and GM both organized. In attempting to capture the utter exuberance of the plant evacuation atmosphere on February 11 th , Henry Kraus describes the crowd’s triumphant mood, specifically the mass booing of the anti-union Strand Theatre as the union procession 109 marched from plant to plant picking up sit-downers then through Flint to union headquarters at Pengelly Hall: “It was a first sign of the new union consciousness and solidarity that had been forged in this struggle, a spirit more earnest and profound and far-reaching perhaps than any that had preceded it and which was destined to sweep from coast to coast in the wake of the splendid victory of the auto workers” (291-92). In anticipating the national spread in spirit thanks to the strikers’ achievement against GM and implicitly, that spirit as a motivating force for other oppressed worker populations to rally and create their own sit-down spirit wave, Kraus envisions a ripple-effect unification similar to the vision of the strike as ultimate cohering agent that ends the play. The play’s final call-and-response is a unifying agent that implicates the audience. As a spectator, one chooses a “side” based on the presentation, and watching GM’s worker-actors and their female supporters perform only allows for one possible relationship – that of siding with the union 14 . In describing the actual performance of Strike Marches On, Kraus writes, “The mere numbers on the low stage: their exuberant, infectious vitality; the audience prompting and responding across the hardly distinguishable break; the universally- shared rock-bottom terms of the enacted message…were these not amply expressive of the class awakening, of a mass soul in birth?” (292). Kraus’ poetic surgings of 14 GM’s corporate rhetoric broadcast lament over the millions lost in worker wages during the course of the strike, a lump sum that worked to undermine the workers and invalidate the strike by illustrating GM’s generosity and the grand sums the company would have willingly paid, specifically, just under $30 million in wages due to the idling of 136,000 workers (Fine 305). Such numbers erase human narratives about individual and organizational causality for the strike. Of course, the real loss in terms of GM’s number crunching was not the frustrating inability to pay out $30 million in worker salaries but the loss of production labor since the strike was responsible for a $175 million dollar hit to corporate profit margins (Fine 305). While corporate profit margins never near worker salaries under capitalism, the far larger $175 million loss was not broadcast by GM as a sympathy builder. 110 class unification suggest how theatre captures, and provides an outlet for, the exuberance of triumph and its transformative power to bridge gaps and represent the workers who were participating in shaping their own representation, be it on stage or as audience or strike participants. Even if Kraus’ named total of 200 performing participants in the play is an exaggeration, what remains clear is that parts labeled “All” and “Audience” were clearly a hall-wide cacophony, not a small chorus trying to imitate a crowd. Given the collaborative nature of the Strike Marches On, assigning specific literary contributions to Mary Heaton Vorse, Josephine Herbst or Dorothy Kraus would be educated guesswork at best, particularly since so many unnamed workers participated in the production and improvised dialogue based on their own lived experiences as workers, so even the script itself is a palimpsest that sketches but doesn’t fully capture the dialogue of the actual production. For coauthor Josephine Herbst, also a member of the Communist Party, the Flint sit-down and the play’s documentation of events was destined to become more than a famed author’s one- time contribution of literary capital as Flint’s sit-down provided the inspiration for yet another literary contribution – the ending of Herbst’s 1939 novel, Rope of Gold. In documenting his feelings on the day of the plant evacuations, Henry Kraus correctly anticipated an infectious spread of union spirit “destined to sweep from coast to coast in the wake of the splendid victory of the auto workers” after the defeat of GM (Kraus 291-92). Kraus’ forecast was a variation on the ending of Strike Marches On where the ripple effects of unity reverberate from the strikers to the larger world aligning behind them, solidifying the autoworkers’ victory. Herbst’s 111 experiences in Flint indeed shapeshifted into a new literary form that was another variety of Kraus’ spirit spread. Rope of Gold is the final novel in Herbst’s thousand- page semi-autobiographical trilogy that matrilineally traces three generations of the Trexler family. The first novel in the trilogy, Pity is Not Enough, was published in 1933 and the second, The Executioner Waits, debuted in 1934. The final volume, Rope of Gold, did not come until five years later in March 1939. Rope of Gold significantly ends with the GM sit-down strike and the accompanying hope for a new word order – capturing both Kraus’ prophecy and the post-victory moment Vorse described when she wrote, “For a moment fear was dead!” (Vorse Flint Notes 21). Given the second volume was published well before the GM sit-down, Herbst either didn’t know how her trilogy would end or changed the ending as a result of the auto strike. Mary Heaton Vorse cited the Plant 4 takeover as the literary genesis for Strike Marches On, and Herbst chooses the same event to end her trilogy, suggesting how central the Plant 4 takeover was in both buoying spirits and ensuring the strike’s victory since it shut down the only production source for Chevrolet bodies in the nation. More significantly, this success demonstrated the strikers’ spirit and unflappable ingenuity since they were able to successfully execute the Plant 4/Plant 9 ruse in spite of GM’s well-armed thugs. They also unseated corporate espionage as gullible for buying the “leak” that Plant 9 was the sit-down target, allowing for the narrow window of distraction needed to secure the closure of Plant 4 before the deception was uncovered. While both Strike Marches On and Rope of Gold end ambiguously in the sense of not spelling out victory, the play’s sole performance 112 collided with the delineated success of the strike, creating its own ending in the moment. Rope of Gold, and therefore the Trexler trilogy as a whole, ends not with a plant recessional and a celebration that includes a metanarrative of Herbst’s own coauthored play, but on February 2 nd , nine days before victory and the plant evacuation, and the morning after the successful Plant 4 takeover. Herbst never calls out the fact she’s describing the GM sit-down or Plant 4, so identifying the fact behind her auto setting fiction requires both strike-specific historical knowledge as well as the biographical knowledge of her presence and participation. One of the novel’s main characters, Steve Carson, wakes up inside the plant, and Herbst offers readers his thoughts as he reflects on the magnitude of the union’s success and what this new and latest victory means for the workers. Carson’s senses are heightened as he’s keenly aware of his swelling union pride that will motivate and sustain the journey ahead. Modeling the actual sit-downers, Steve sits down to compose a letter to his wife, Lorraine, and his opening salutations dissolve and merge with the intense thoughts and feelings he wants to communicate, “Oh, my dear wife, my darling, and it seemed to him he had never loved her so much as now, lying on this cold stone floor with all the men around him who were thinking his same thoughts” (Herbst 428). Steve acknowledges not just physical unity in sharing the temporary domestic space of the plant but emotional unity in that the other men also experience separation from loved ones and the ambition to succeed in the strike. The success of the plant takeover awakens Steve’s zeal and confidence as he reflects that “the tools of a man’s mind are brightest when he meets danger” (427). Steve recognizes the degenerating 113 redundancy of life on the assembly line has dulled him, and the strike has awakened a sleeping self-awareness and motivating desire for greater accomplishment, a sentiment no doubt shared by participants in the Women’s Emergency Brigade. At one point, Steve Carson visualizes his job as a box: “This is my job, he thought, and he seemed to see his job like a box that could be carried in his hand. Nothing elegant like a doctor’s medicine kit or a lawyer’s briefcase or a dentist’s elaborate shiny tools. Just a job, like a brick, at the foundation of a skyscraper” (Herbst 428). Steve sees his role in unadorned terms of ownership, but when that box becomes a brick and is removed from a foundation, the towering structure weakens. Extending the man as box metaphor, when all of the foundational bricks are removed, the entire structure crumbles. The sit-down removed all of the workers, or “bricks,” ultimately nearly stagnating GM’s production, thereby heightening the necessity of each individual brick, helping each worker see his job in more integrated terms whereas assembly line work discourages the awareness of collectivism. The metaphor of job as box is made visual in an entire scene in Strike Marches On where one striker with a box is a synecdoche for the entire strike population. The Loudspeaker asks the Worker what he’s carried in and the Worker taps the box he’s set in the middle of the stage and says, “‘That’s my job.’ (he sets the box down and sits upon it.)” (Vorse, Herbst, and Kraus 7). The placement of the box in the middle of the stage repeats the brashness the worker showed to the foreman over the union button since this worker’s self-selected box placement suggests his confidence. His actions also mirrored the actual plant occupations; the strikers could guard and defend the whole plant more easily from a centralized location, just as this worker’s centrality gives him both the 114 appearance of authority and the ability to monitor the perimeter of the stage as plant. The resurgence of the same descriptor in Rope of Gold offers compelling evidence that Herbst contributed this scene to the coauthored text. The conversation about the box between the Loudspeaker and the Worker also stands out in the play because it’s notably more abstract than other scenes, which either roleplay general conversations, such as that between the foreman and worker, or reenact key strike scenes, such as the gassing of the workers by the police in the January 11 th Battle of Bull’s Run. Whether it was Herbst’s novel, the performance of Strike Marches On, the actions of the Emergency Brigade or of those women on kitchen duty, the sit-down rapidly moved women into a new female-dominant community where they became public advocates for the striking men who were thrust into a version of female domesticity that necessitated them staying behind plant walls. The rise in female visibility, be it through the workplace due to Depression-era economic need or the strike space, anticipated the skyrocket in female labor that would come only a few years later during World War II. While the appearance of women on the frontlines may have been initially driven to some extent by circumstance, the roles women adopted led to new communities outside of the home that fostered a new sense of self-worth and the motivation to fight for not just for the men, but for improvements in women’s rights like equal pay, all serving as performance precursors to feminism. 115 Chapter 3 Brookwood Labor College: Flint’s Sit-Down Becomes Sit-Down! Just three and a half months after the strikers’ triumphant February 11, 1937 mass exodus from General Motors’ plants, Flint autoworkers had the opportunity to witness their recent struggles performed back to them by the Brookwood Labor Players in an original play about the GM sit-down strike entitled Sit-Down!. The Labor Players originated from Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, sixty miles outside of New York City. The troupe, comprised of Brookwood students, traveled by bus for several weeks each summer and performed their Labor Chautauqua, a working class themed, non-secular version of the tent Chautauquas popular in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Brookwood’s Chautauqua was a labor variety show of student and staff-generated content that included topical plays and skits about current labor issues as well as labor songs, mass recitations, and even puppet theatre. Audiences were primarily labor union members and would number into the thousands over the course of a summer. Brookwood shows were most often incorporated into regular union meetings, but the troupe also enjoyed sporadic sponsorship from actual labor theatres and occasionally performed for leftist political benefits and organizations of the unemployed. The 1937 centerpiece of the sixth annual Brookwood Labor Chautauqua was the play Sit-Down!, which was authored by William Titus, that season’s co-director of the Brookwood Labor Players. Titus’ Sit-Down! contextualized the conflict and chronicled the sit-down struggles between 116 Flint’s autoworkers and General Motors. Brookwood’s traveling theatre performance circuit of worker-students validated working class representation while using working class talent and facilitated the circulation and transmission of worker stories and strike strategies among working class audiences. Their plays documented and preserved working class events and triumphs that were often excluded from mainstream news sources. By serving as an alternative media source that documented labor struggle and worker power, Brookwood’s theatre helped build a nationalized labor movement. Brookwood Labor College opened in 1921 as the nation’s first prominent residential labor college 15 and was founded by socialists and pacifists, including A.J. Muste, a well-known Christian pacifist of the time who would later turn Marxist. Brookwood’s ideological framework was to provide educational opportunities for the working class as a means of empowerment and as a tool to narrow the disparity in power, education and organization between employer and employee, which placed their Chautauqua program very closely in alignment with the school’s broader philosophy. Brookwood’s founding cultivated a demand and spurred the subsequent opening of a rash of other labor colleges, but Brookwood always remained the most prominent, innovative, and widely recognized of these schools 16 . Brookwood’s primary institutional goal was educating and training workers from various industries to become effective, change-inducing leaders. The school’s forward-thinking, fervent 15 The Work People’s College was actually the first labor college, evolving out a Finnish high school, but it primarily remained part of the Finnish subculture and never achieved the national recognition Brookwood achieved. 16 Brookwood’s background and founding is covered in Richard Altenbaugh’s Education for Struggle on pages 70-81. Altenbaugh focuses on Brookwood and other significant labor colleges of the time. 117 anti-discrimination admission policies resulted in a diverse campus that included men, women, and students of color while also spanning the political and labor movements. The school brought coal miners, autoworkers, electricians, garment workers, teachers, stenographers, retail clerks, farmers, and firemen together in common classrooms to learn and network in an environment that enhanced students’ real-world working experiences with practical, labor-relevant classroom education. Students gained the tools to augment their knowledge and thereby facilitate labor organizing and problem solving for workers and other oppressed populations. This worker population comprised Brookwood’s student body, and recruits were often already active leaders. Students spent two years at Brookwood with the goal of returning to their respective industries or the wider labor movement with the necessary skills to plunge in and serve as instrumental activists and leaders. The Brookwood curriculum was tailored quite specifically to focus on labor issues and was divided between what the school deemed background and tool courses. Background courses provided a broader, historicized framework for current struggles and included subjects like the history of labor, Marxism, and imperialism. Tool courses were more immediately practical and included coursework on public speaking, methods of union organization, and the effective running of union meetings. Brookwood also offered a three-week summer school program that targeted workers for whom long-term employment leave was not feasible but who still wanted the benefits of labor education. Many students in both the full-time track and summer sessions were sponsored by scholarships from their respective unions. 118 In 1933, A.J. Muste, Brookwood’s chairman, contentiously withdrew his support and left the school after he became an avid proponent of revolutionary Marxism and the wider faculty, primarily Farmer-Labor party members, did not support adopt his ideological persuasion as a new institutional political platform. Despite radical political underpinnings, the school in general was committed to staying as ideologically non-partisan as possible to garner the widest support in the labor movement since they relied so heavily on union funding. Tucker P. Smith replaced Muste as the school’s new director, a position Smith held until the school’s closure due to financial difficulties in fall 1937. Brookwood’s chronically scant funding always cast a pallid threat of closure over the 52-acre institution, and this threat escalated after a fallout with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1928. AFL executives were threatened in feeling Brookwood opposed their craft-based model of union organization. This was largely true as Brookwood advocated and fought for equality for all workers, and the AFL’s continued resistance to organizing industrial workers was a point of disagreement 17 . Even though Brookwood tried to elide the point in an effort to preserve peace and therefore funding, the knowledge of an ideological schism was ultimately too threatening for the AFL who encouraged their affiliated unions to sever Brookwood funding. Ultimately, the situation at Brookwood foreshadowed the 1936 conflict that divided the traditional, craft-based AFL and the progressive, industrial-based Committee for Industrial Organization (or CIO, to become the more familiar Congress of Industrial Organizations after its 17 The AFL (pronounced AF of L) was nicknamed and colloquially referred to as the AF of Hell by unskilled and semiskilled workers due to the organization’s resistance to organizing these worker populations, which is to say the recognition of the AFL’s old-fashioned and outdated craft-based system was widespread and not just limited to Brookwood (from the documentary The Wobblies). 119 official split from the AFL in 1938). In addition, the school relied heavily on private funding from wealthy benefactors with strong working class sympathies who wanted to contribute to the betterment of the labor movement. As 1920’s expansiveness gave way to 1930’s economic collapse, steadily declining donation rates and students’ inabilities to afford even Brookwood’s low tuition, proved to be irreplaceable revenue streams that contributed to the school’s final descent into bankruptcy in fall 1937 (Altenbaugh 225). However, Brookwood was revolutionary as a successful 16-year execution of a belief about the need for worker education that proved collegiate-level education with working class relevance truly had a demand. The school’s commitment to radical approaches extended well beyond its founding principles. As early as 1930, the school hired a drama instructor, Jasper Deeter, from New York’s Provincetown Theatre, cementing the school’s ongoing relationship with New York-based workers’ theatre, and allowing for the development of the Brookwood Labor Players, which had existed since the 1920’s. Photos in the Brookwood scrapbooks document on- campus theatre as well as off-campus performances, such as a 1926 performance in New York City that included Susan Glaspell’s 18 The People, a unnamed satire by David Pinski, and Harold Williamson’s play, Peggy. A photo of the Peggy cast does not name the performers on the back but does note their professions – three miners, a garment worker, a stenographer, and a railway worker – which attests to the diversity of Brookwood’s students, the school’s emphasis on the worker over the individual, 18 Glaspell was a member of the Provincetown Players, which is where drama instructor Deeter came from, pointing to a long-standing partnership between Brookwood and this professional theatre group. 120 and the willingness of differing labor populations to risk a trial involvement in theatre. Another photo captures Brookwood students Eva Shafran and Beckie Friedman standing side-by-side with their arms slung around each other in a gesture of affection. They are noted as the coauthors of The Start, a 4-act labor play presented by Brookwood students at New York City’s Labor Temple on April 27, 1927. Another photo identifies Eva as a member of the Millinery Workers’ Union of New York, suggesting the coauthored play may have been about the millinery or garment industry since workers often wrote about their own industries or experiences 19 . Student-authored plays were certainly written and performed before the start of the travelling Chautauqua in 1932, but they were limited to on-campus performances or New York-based shows at professional workers’ theatres. With the founding of Brookwood’s traveling Labor Chautauqua roadshow in 1932, participation in the labor college’s dramatics program became compulsory, and student-generated texts found a wider national audience that was more worker-based. Brookwood’s fall term, which started in September, was devoted to theories of playwriting and acting, and students spent the winter session developing and authoring plays for that summer’s traveling Chautauqua, culling material from current events. This allowed Brookwood to move away from relying on professionally- authored plays with working class sympathies as the school expanded its own repository of labor drama from which to draw. Each student was required to perform two months of fieldwork, and participation in the Chautauqua tour fulfilled that 19 The play’s possible industry focus is my conjecture, but it’s based on the fact that Brookwood students most commonly wrote plays about the industries they came from. The curriculum encouraged the use of personal experience or witness as dramatic foundation. 121 stipulation. The fact all Chautauqua labor was curriculum-based and student- generated kept Brookwood’s production costs low, which allowed the school to keep Chautauqua sponsorship at a reasonable rate for chronically budget-constrained unions. Brookwood charged sponsoring organizations $25 for a performance (a fee that was raised to $35 in 1937) and requested half of any ticket sales (the other half went to the sponsor). Brookwood also sought complimentary lodging for troupe members in the homes of local workers of the sponsoring organization. Requesting lodging made both financial and organizational sense. The troupe manager did not have to worry about securing housing for each Chautauqua stop, which saved hotel fees. In addition, Brookwooders gained greater access to each city’s worker population, which was useful since students were being prepared to reintegrate into and advance the cause of the working class upon graduation. Since Brookwood’s worker-students came from the ranks and would return to the ranks, or return as leaders of the ranks, the opportunity to stay with local sponsors gave the performers a chance to build good will and learn firsthand about local labor issues as well as secure contacts that could translate to use value during later advocacy, particularly since those who volunteered a lodging space were undoubtedly more active union members. The Chautauqua wasn’t purely theatre-based as the troupe often visited the worksites of sponsoring organizations as well as participated in rallies, labor strikes, meetings with union officials, and even museum visits, anything that could augment direct involvement with the working class, particularly in the industry relevant to their current stop. This is to say the requisite two months of fieldwork wasn’t just 122 limited to the labor of taking the Chautauqua show on the road. This breadth of activity lent greater authenticity to Brookwood’s fieldwork platform, dissolving the boundaries between worker, student, performer, and activist. Even though the AFL officially recommended discontinuing support for Brookwood in 1928, many of its unions still supported Brookwood, and the school maintained contact with the AFL as well. Each troupe was responsible for maintaining a log to record daily expenses and any revenue as well as show attendance and any performance-related comments about audience reactions or venue challenges. Some log keepers went beyond factual recordation to make the log as a journal that descriptively recorded general troupe events. The unnamed log keeper for the 1935 northern troupe consistently detailed more than required. He or she notes that on May 23, 1935 the troupe performed for a crowd of 250 for Detroit’s Central Trades’ Council and also met with long-time AFL executives Francis Dillon and Matthew Woll about “the auto situation” (Brookwood 1935 log 20 ). Dillon and Woll were both conservative, and the perceived threat of a non-craft-based union model was still a continued point of resistance as opposed to being seen as an opportunity. The log keeper describes the interaction: “The troupe acted very well – not trying to tell the AF of L how to run the industry, but merely asking questions for information” (original emphasis, Brookwood 1935 log). Clearly, the ideological schism between Brookwood and the AFL did not cease with the AFL’s recommended 1928 cut-off. Because of Dillon and Woll’s executive status and the continued support for Brookwood from some AFL unions, the troupe clearly 20 The journals are hand-written in a notebook, so there’s no pagination, no authorial naming (although all of them were written by a troupe member), and they’re simply ordered by date. I have not seen these journals given more than passing mention in any readings I’ve done. 123 spoke with cautious restraint while strategically questioning the executives into a realization of and commitment to action in organizing the auto industry. The stodgy Dillon and Woll symbolized the elitism inherent in the craft-based AFL structure that only represented those workers who were craftspeople. Yet, their willingness to take a meeting with Brookwood’s Chautauqua students suggests a recognition of the flaws in their methodology, a realization that was sadly stifled from action by pride. Ultimately, it would take the rise of the CIO, which evolved out of the AFL, to successfully champion and organize industrial workers. In addition to the May 23 rd performance and AFL meeting, the troupe also visited Detroit’s Art Institute to “see Diego Rivera murals…(these are on the Auto Industry)” (Brookwood 1935 log). Rivera’s 27-panel mural in the museum’s garden court, completed in 1933, addressed the theme of the rise of technology and focused intensively on representations of the auto assembly line. Rivera’s paean to Detroit’s working class was created between April 1932 and March 1933 and was funded by Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, who was interested in art and design and served as President of both the Ford Motor Company and the Detroit Arts Commission (Pastan 2). Rivera conducted most of his research at Ford’s River Rouge plant, a 1,200-acre compound with tens of thousands of workers (2), which the Chautauqua troupe visited the day after their museum visit. Rivera’s renderings of the assembly line were so accurate that the engineers who reviewed them were amazed by the artist’s eye for accuracy and could identify each part of the assembly line design. As a Communist with a strong interest in working class depictions, Rivera’s only major change to the assembly line was to dissolve the plant’s strict racial divides and integrate black 124 workers, who were only hired for the most menial of tasks, into the line with white workers. Rivera’s visionary artistic renderings communicated his politics and preceded actual racial integration on the line by decades. The 1935 Chautauqua troupe, which included two African-American students and two Puerto Ricans 21 , undoubtedly noticed Rivera’s ethnic egalitarianism and his homage to the industrial worker, both of which were in keeping with Brookwood’s founding tenets. The log keeper’s parenthetical rationale about the museum visit as motivated by the murals’ focus on “the Auto Industry” reinforces the worker-centric focus of all of the troupe’s actions and activism. Rivera’s vision of racial equality on the assembly line and his public, large-scale rendering of Detroit’s industrial workers with dignity stood in stark contrast to Dillon and Woll. The AFL was supposed to represent the working class but maintained a tight and persistent definition by exclusion that deemed industrial workers, due to their semiskilled or unskilled status, as unworthy of organization and representation, which thereby reinforced class – and by extension race since most workers of color were unskilled laborers – hierarchies. Rivera’s massive murals undoubtedly served as a point of comparison during the troupe’s visit to Ford’s River Rouge plant the next day where segregation ruled and the speed of the assembly line animated Rivera’s frozen frescoes into frenzy. Activism certainly wasn’t limited to the Chautauqua troupe members. When Dorothy Lorio was traveling in spring 1937 as Brookwood’s booking agent and securing show dates for the upcoming season, she recounts participating at a strike in 21 Both the ethnic and gender make-up of the troupe are often noted in Brookwood’s communications with union venues. Presumably, this was to avoid non-white worker-students being placed with racist lodgers since the sponsoring union was responsible for finding troupe accommodations. 125 Hershey, Pennsylvania in a letter back to Brookwood. Her writing captures the excitement and danger inherent in running leaflets out to the plant at midnight under the guise of night, noting it was “very thrilling” and that “morale is good” (Lorio 9 April 1937). As a former Chautauqua member and Brookwood graduate turned employee, Lorio’s actions were consistent with the worker-centric, advocacy mission of the larger institution, and the passion she expresses over aiding this cause clearly enriched her duties as a booking agent while building institutional goodwill for Brookwood. By broadening their worker-students’ exposure to and involvement with other worker populations, Brookwood went beyond academic philosophizing to promulgate active service to a larger good in the labor movement. The Chautauqua swelled steadily from a 17-show run in its 1932 inaugural season to 65 shows in 1934 and 125-150 performances in 1936 with each subsequent season extending the outer periphery of the troupe’s travels (Smith 4). In 1932, the show only traveled as far as Philadelphia, but by 1936, the Chautauqua reached audiences as far away as Minnesota. The 1935 season peaked in terms of geographic coverage since three performance troupes traveled simultaneously; 1936 dropped to two troupes – a northern and a southern, and 1937 scaled back in a return to the pre- 1935 one troupe norm. However, the 1937 season ran slightly longer, starting April 7 th and concluding on June 9 th , and in that two-month span, the troupe traveled from Massachusetts to as far south as Baltimore and west to Wisconsin before returning to Katonah. Brookwood shows developed a good reputation and were typically incorporated into union meetings, which were already well-attended by union members, so the advertising needed to draw in audiences was minimal; consequently, 126 the number of attendees reached by each season’s Chautauqua was astonishingly high. Per show, audiences ranged anywhere from 150 at the lower echelons to upwards of 500 audience members. In 1936 alone, the Chautauqua performed before nearly 40,000 people over the course of two months. Such geographic and numeric reach, combined with often-annual visits, allowed Brookwood to promote itself institutionally and created a massive opportunity to influence workers. Brookwood’s 1936 promotional brochure about the Labor Players and the Chautauqua describes the troupe’s performers as “worker-students” (Brookwood Courses 22 ). This term establishes the general student population, even in the context of the Chautauqua, as first and most definitively workers, then secondarily students, suggesting all study is in the service of advancing the worker. Particularly in light of the program’s mandatory participation, Brookwood did not consider the performers to be actors; in fact, actors would be an arbitrary descriptor that gave primacy to that component of the theatrical process. The “worker-students” could just as easily be labeled playwrights or designers since they were responsible for all phases of the dramatic process from ideation to execution, including the construction of curtains and costumes, transforming Brookwood into its own vertical theatre industry. The careful avoidance of the term actor establishes non-professional standards and allies the performers with working class audiences, disabling – or at least discouraging – an us/them, actor/audience split. The school clearly did not want audiences to perceive the Brookwooders as socially separate and classify them as “actors.” 22 This brochure is part of the Roy Reuther Collection, not the Brookwood Collection, at Wayne State University’s Walter Reuther Library, so I haven’t even seen it referenced in connection with Brookwood. Roy Reuther was a Brookwood student, an instructor there, and as a former autoworker was a trusted source and was instrumental in the Flint sit-down as a go-to organizer. 127 One of the goals (and frequent outcomes) of the Brookwood shows was to encourage local theatre. Showcasing the performers as workers more readily enabled the necessary transfer of imagination and capacity for imitation between what audiences saw performed and what they thought themselves capable of. In promotional materials and on-site, the emphasis on the players (or worker-students) as laborers who used their own experiences as workers as the basis for their acting effectively severed the association with acting as a trained profession. In fact, the word actors only appears once on the promotional collateral: “Brookwood actors are not polished professionals, but they can sincerely portray workers’ lives on the stage; for they are workers themselves, from garment factories in New York, Chicago, and Baltimore; from Detroit auto factories and Wisconsin paper mills; from farms in Ohio and Tennessee. What Brookwood plays lack in finish, these players make up in earnestness. Eager to inspire workers to action, they practice art, not for art’s sake, but for action’s sake” (my emphasis, Brookwood Labor Players Program 23 ). This sole appearance of the word “actors” in the six-page brochure is used to define in the negative what the Brookwood troupe is not, a point that is emphasized with the subsequent sampling of specific jobs the players hold. The no doubt judiciously selected employment list correlated with Brookwood’s two largest recurring sponsor populations – garment workers and autoworkers – and also cross-pollinated with typical audience stops on the Chautauqua to reinforce the similarities between performers and attendees. In fact, 23 Like the aforementioned 1936 Brookwood Courses brochure, this one is also part of the Roy Reuther Collection and is not duplicated in the Brookwood Collection, so again I have not seen reference to it in the comprehensive set of materials I’ve reviewed. 128 the brochure encouraged the thought that attendees were likely to see their own union members on stage, or at the least, people very similar to them. Since Brookwood’s worker-students who came from the ranks also doubled as the playwrights, dramatic material, even if somewhat unpolished (which the brochure braces audiences for), would likely be relevant and applicable to the interests of the attending working populations. Perhaps in anticipation of charges about the irrelevance of theatre and that workers masquerading as actors was bordering on frivolity, the final sentence in the brochure emphasized the purpose of the program to inspire and serve “not for art’s sake, but for action’s sake,” summarizing the Chautauqua’s mission and reinforcing that the substance of the stage would be change-inducing, social protest theatre, not cathartic, drawing room drama. The 1936-37 academic year was the first (and unbeknownst at the time, but also final) year of a new one-year program entitled the Professional Course in Labor Drama. Consequently, the 1937 Chautauqua was the first (and again, last) to benefit from a dedicated group attracted to Brookwood primarily on the basis of using drama to serve and advance the interests of the working class. The program seemed to be created partly in response to the growing success of the Chautauqua, especially since the Brookwood Players were often requested during the academic year and had limited bandwidth, which could be more easily accommodated by a dedicated group. Elizabeth England, who was Brookwood’s 1935-36 dramatics instructor and a labor dramatist herself, seemed to be another creative inspiration for the new program. In a hand-written letter to Tucker Smith penned during the 1936 Chautauqua pre-season, England informs Tucker that while she leaves with “a deep regard for the high 129 objectives of Brookwood,” she won’t be returning to Brookwood to teach drama in the fall (England 4 April 1936). England goes on to say, “Believe me, I appreciate fully that Brookwood’s ambitious Chautauqua program necessitates drafting all students for training for the project. But this appreciation of the school’s pragmatic need does not alter what is a fact in the fulfillment of a cultural subject – that people only work enthusiastically and harmoniously in such a subject when they have come to it voluntarily” (her emphasis, England 4 April 1936). England believed the compulsory nature of the program contaminated the experience of those who were truly dedicated as well as compromised the overall quality of the resulting plays and acting. Due to the collaborative nature of theatre, those who were less inclined to drama as a first defense for working class advancement or truly lacked theatrical ability risked the Chautauqua’s effectiveness. However, England’s argument is flawed in assuming all matriculating worker- students can accurately assess their aptitude for or level of dramatic interest when many of them undoubtedly had limited or no prior exposure to labor drama or theatre. She advocates for an entirely elective program without acknowledging that a compulsory introductory drama class would (and undoubtedly did) allow some students to identify a hitherto unknown passion or talent, missing the opportunity to convert a percentage of worker-students into theatre advocates who could usefully and enthusiastically participate in the Chautauqua group and later, positively integrate these skills into the labor field after graduation. Even those who didn’t become advocates for theatre as an effective, necessary medium for social change could at least benefit from the exposure of an introductory class as a potential tool and another 130 medium of labor activism. In addition, England’s argument disregards the wider scope of the Chautauqua in that the troupe was hardly limited to performing plays given that their fieldwork extended to participation in rallies, involvement with local strikes and labor issues, and tours of mines and other site-specific industries. Towards the end of England’s letter, she comments on the reception of the pre-season 1936 Chautauqua troupe, noting “surprisingly good reactions” and continues on to say, “This group works hard and, with minor exceptions, cooperates thoroughly. They are a hard working bunch and take their duty toward the school seriously” (England 4 April 1936). The positive audience responses were clearly somewhat unexpected for her, suggesting England’s expectations as a professional were out of sync with those audiences to whom the troupe performed, and this bit of reportage from the road works against England’s overall argument for purely elective-based drama studies. Despite mandatory participation, positive group dynamics emerged and a strong work ethic, commitment to Brookwood, and desire to protect and advance its institutional reputation combined with sufficient talent and enthusiasm for labor theatrics to elicit consistently positive audience reactions. Since many Chautauqua performances were standing annual venues, each new troupe performed for some audiences with points of comparison. This means the 1936 group at least held their own, and potentially outperformed, the previous year’s group, even with the continued saddle of compulsory participation. A dedicated labor theatre program certainly attracted a more targeted demographic and consequently improved the quality of both the acting and plays, although despite the emergence of an exclusive drama program, all of the plays for 131 the 1937 Chautauqua season, including the seminal piece Sit-Down!, were authored by Bill Titus, an experienced playwright and the co-director of the Brookwood Players 24 . This was a change from previous years when the students had authored the plays, so the emergence of the labor drama program resulted in a somewhat antithetical outcome in that in professionalizing the program, participants’ plays were not used for the Chautauqua. Titus as a seasoned labor dramatist penned a high- quality, audience-accessible, factual final product with Sit-Down!. However, he also undermined the program goal of developing working class dramatists, especially considering one of the largest perceived problems in labor theatre at the time was the collective sentiment that the workers’ theatre movement lacked both choice and substance in available plays. This point was a central rallying point of agreement by participants at the Workers’ Theatre Conference that Brookwood hosted on March 29, 1936. The 1937 Brookwood Labor Chautauqua was the sixth (and while unknown at the time, the final) annual summer season and the first experiment with a new format. From 1932 to 1936, the roughly two hour show consisted of three one-act plays plus labor songs, a mass recitation, and a novelty number, such as a puppet show, but in 1937, Titus’ Sit-Down! introduced the troupe’s first multi-act play. The show’s overall running time remained approximately the same since another short play and the songs, etc. were maintained, but Titus’ longer multi-act replaced the traditional 24 As a historian, Richard Altenbaugh devotes only 14 pages of his book to labor college drama (102- 16), and this subset covers all of the workers’ colleges he discusses. While Brookwood entails roughly six of these fourteen pages, Altenbaugh focuses mostly on the school’s earlier drama and makes no mention of Titus’ Sit-Down!, which was one of the school’s crowning dramatic achievements. I could not locate any academic discussion of the play. 132 trio of one-acts and provided a focal point for what had previously been more of a variety show format. The traditional smattering of equi-length one-acts allowed the show to cover a wide variety of topics, which was strategic marketing on Brookwood’s part in attempting to appeal to the widest breadth of audiences. Given the Players performed for a range of unions, they wanted to appeal to as many audiences as possible, both for immediate relevance and to help guarantee bookings for the subsequent season. For instance, the 1935 season featured a play about unionizing problems in the auto industry, another about the garment industry, and an anti-war play. The 1936 dramatic trio included a satire about company unions, a peace play, and one about the problems facing the creation of a labor party. None of the plays in the 1936 season focused on a specific industry, and Brookwood officials expressed particular concern about the absence of a play on the auto industry since the auto demographic represented a substantive portion of their annual viewership and the industry was in tumult and on the verge of strike. However, the school, which authored all of its own plays by this point, was not able to come up with a viable work. Elizabeth England, Brookwood’s dramatics instructor, even solicited playwright Erwin Shaw of New York City’s New Theatre League, a professional workers’ theatre, as late as March 21, 1936 to come up to Brookwood and help the students churn out a one-act on the auto industry since the troupe was booked to perform “before most of the automobile unions in the west” (England 21 March 1936). England’s salient concern illustrates the urgency Brookwood felt in being ever conscious of and responsive to their audience to ensure their numerous auto industry 133 venues would be rebooked the following season, and while fees to guarantee the Brookwood performers were low, budget-conscious unions wouldn’t support an event their members no longer wanted or found irrelevant. For the 1935 Chautauqua season, Brookwooders Esther Levine and George Nordstrom coauthored a play about the auto industry entitled Model 7A 25 . Nordstrom was an autoworker from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the play was based on Nordstrom’s experience with a chiseling boss who tried to frame the union leader as a traitor. While the subtitle for Model 7A is not cited on any of the Brookwood materials, probably due to its length, it is printed on the actual script of the archived play: A play in 4 scenes, portraying the situation in the automobile industry, in the spring of 1935. The title demonstrates how contemporary issues were the heart of the Brookwood theatrical medium, and not just contemporary issues, but events that had occurred since the last Chautauqua season, which motivated previous sponsors to host the Chautauqua again. Unlike Sit-Down!, which ends with victory, Model 7A ends with the promise of victory as the workers are gathered in the yard for a rally after presenting their demands. Of course, victory wasn’t to pan out for the autoworkers until 1937, but representations of collective worker action remained relevant and motivated continued efforts. The 1936 promotional brochure for the Brookwood Labor Players lists several plays available for purchase, and while none of the authors are named, each play is described in brief; Model 7A is described as “The need for organization and action in the automobile industry, based on the personal experiences 25 I was able to find a copy of this play within the Brookwood archives at Wayne State, but the collection of Brookwood plays is more scant than complete. 134 of one of the authors. 4 scenes; 7 men, 2 women” (Brookwood Labor Players Program). Authorial credit is irrelevant since the authors would be unknown anyway, but the fact the brochure notes the connection to personal experience reinforces the copy above the list of plays: “After seeing the Brookwood Labor Players and the Brookwood plays – their appeal, their simplicity, their inexpensiveness – many local groups wish to start their own dramatics…It is really much easier than most workers would guess to build such vital links in our movement” (Brookwood Labor Players Program). Brookwood makes some shared assumptions, including the fact that advancing “our movement” is a common, if vaguely defined, goal. They also suggest Nordstrom’s personal experience as dramatic basis could be achieved by the prospective labor drama groups the brochure addresses, either in reproducing Model 7A or in writing their own play based on personal experience. While Model 7A addressed the Chautauqua’s large autoworker population, a play entitled Shop Strife 26 by coauthors Fred Wright and Sidney Jones presented a play in the same 1935 season about a successful labor strike in a garment shop, providing a text for the vast textile audiences that comprised Brookwood’s annual viewership. Focusing on strikes provided a motivating rallying point for the textile workers and reminded them of past achievements and struggles that paved the proverbial way for future advances for workers. Along with Nordstrom and Levine, Brookwood student Jess Ogden rounded out the 1935 season with his anti-war drama God and Country 27 , which tells the story of four dead soldiers who end up in a 26 I was also able to locate a copy of this play in the Brookwood archives. 27 I was able to find a description of Ogden’s play on the back of the 1936 promotional brochure but not the full text. 135 purgatory called Nowhere and discover a shared, communal opposition to war, despite coming from varying sides. Brookwood typically incorporated an anti-war play into each season’s line-up, suggesting thin spots in Brookwood’s staunch attempts to avoid alienation and appear neutral. Motivation to communicate the school’s strong pacifist position and strengthen the anti-war movement was a worthy risk, especially since anti-war material could be blended with a predominance of fervent pro-worker messaging. After graduating from Brookwood, Jess Ogden went on to teach at Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, New York but continued to be involved with Brookwood and the Chautauqua as much as his teaching schedule would permit. Brookwood students commonly shared a profound, post-graduation institutional devotion, and while loyalty to one’s alma mater is hardly uncommon, this went far beyond mascot-waving, brand-emblazonment (and Brookwood had no mascot) because Brookwood’s worker-students came from working-class backgrounds and had limited access to higher education. A Brookwood education represented an opportunity that had seemed an inaccessible impossibility. In 1937, Ogden and coauthor Jean Carter, director of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, had a book published by Harcourt Brace entitled The Play Book: An Elementary Book on Stage Technique with Nine Plays of Various Types and Some Suggestions for Creative Use of Plays and Playing. In a letter to Myra Smith at Brookwood (Tucker’s wife and a Brookwood faculty member herself), Ogden comments that Tucker should be pleased because most of the book was authored during Ogden’s first summer at Brookwood. This locates the text as profoundly 136 influenced by Brookwood teachings. Ogden entered in the class of 1934, and if he completed most of the book in his first summer at Brookwood, it most directly reflected his learnings from Hazel MacKaye, the 1934-35 dramatics instructor, as well as lessons from Elizabeth England, the 1935-36 drama teacher. The auto, textile, anti-war trifecta represented an typical subject line-up for the Chautauqua trio of one acts since it covered their major audiences 28 and was augmented with mass recitations, mass chants, and satirical skits. The industry-based plays didn’t exclude other audiences since they offered thematic touchstones for audiences outside of auto and textile. All dramatic content was thematically driven by the necessity of the fight for worker rights and justice through unionization, foregrounding worker unity as a necessary precursor to unionization and improved workplace conditions. Such unity consequently trickled down to the added win of an improved homelife since more humane working conditions courtesy of union intervention lessened exhaustion and freed up more time and energy for familial bonding. While 1936 season may have fallen short in terms of its relevance to auto industry issues, the 1937 season more than compensated since Titus’s Sit-Down! ran 45 minutes, which presented a possible risk in terms of maintaining audience interest outside of the auto industry. Titus penned his play in parallel with the strike as it unfurled, creating a hybrid blend of reportage and living newspaper that transformed the strike into a dramatic, visual textbook. Titus’ efforts were fraught with risk; he set 28 I haven’t seen this argued before. It’s my own deduction after reading the selection of available plays and reading descriptions of the remainder. 137 out to dramatically document an event with an undetermined ending that could only be written by the outcome of the strike itself. He wrote concurrently with the strike, hoping it would end favorably for the workers, both for their sake and for literary fulfillment, so a realistic and inspiring ending could be brought to the play and therefore to Brookwood’s summer Chautauqua audiences. As the strike dragged into February, the sit-down threatened not to conclude in time for Titus to finish and polish his play for the start of season, let alone provide the Chautauqua troupe sufficient time for memorization and rehearsal before hitting the road. Titus’ methodology also violated a foundational playwriting principle taught by the previous year’s instructor, Elizabeth England, which was to know how a play will end before one starts writing. Such differences illustrate how pedagogical approach shifted with changes in faculty. Titus clearly felt creating a highly factual, up-to-the-minute play was a worthy gamble. England advocated for a clear sense of direction to sharpen the writing process, but Titus’ decision to write with the strike both violated such principles and risked an unhappy or undetermined ending since his curtain would be determined by the sit-down’s outcome, not his own creativity, lending a heightened urgency and verisimilitude to the play. The difference in methodology between the two instructors shows how much approaches to playwriting varied within the Brookwood education and illustrates that differing methodologies achieved favorable results. To ensure accuracy and experience the strike conditions and setting firsthand, Titus traveled to Michigan to interview strike participants, and he integrated the real names of strikers, strike opponents, locations and events into his play. In going to 138 Michigan, Titus harvested the stories and memories of involved workers in addition to garnering his own firsthand observations, and his final product was a historicized drama that offered a storage space and reenactment point for these memories. His play codified an alternative historical document of the strike, one that was re-enacted across the nation by the Brookwood Players, who transported the story of success in Flint. At the start of the 1937 Chautauqua season, the auto industry still remained in the national labor spotlight. The strikers’ landmark win in February against General Motors still had the nation reeling and struggling to comprehend how such a coup had been successfully carried out. After all, the autoworkers were vastly outbudgeted and grossly understaffed in comparison to General Motors as a corporate giant. Titus’ play capitalized on the national curiosity of workers across industries to learn from the autoworkers, and his play provided an accurate, accelerated re-creation of the conditions leading up to the strike as well as the strike itself. In effect, he used the medium of theatre to show how the auto underdogs had been able to pull off, sustain, and succeed with their sit-down strike. Even during the strike, the UAW office in Flint fielded frequent calls from other union wannabe working class populations who were inspired by the autoworkers and had also stood up for themselves and gone out on strike, only to be utterly lost at what next steps to take. These fledgling unions requested both guidance and membership in the UAW until a union in their industry could be developed. The contacts didn’t let up post-strike as proximity to the sit-down epicenter of Flint made Detroit the nation’s new urban strike center: “In the second week after the General Motors settlement, four or five thousand working people at twenty or thirty different 139 workplaces throughout the city went on strike” (Frank 75). The auto industry strike became a model performance to which other oppressed workers were eager to gain the performance rights as it were and to restage in their workplace. The autoworkers thus became heroes that other working class laborers wanted to emulate to gain similar results and fuller rights in their industry. What was sacrificed in Brookwood’s departure from its usual triple play formal was compensated for in depth by Sit- Down!; the longer format allowed for fuller documentation of the auto crisis and its nuances as well as character development. Even though the official 1937 season didn’t kick off until April 7, in prior weeks, the troupe performed for unions and audiences within driving range of Katonah, and these standard pre-season stops provided a testbed audience for the new season’s still nascent material and meant neighboring cities were never part of the regular tour. One of the earliest shows for the 1937 Chautauqua was on March 5 in Tarrytown, New York; not even a month had passed since the strike’s conclusion, and the final draft of Sit-Down! was not yet finalized, so the troupe only performed selected scenes. At Tarrytown, the test audience was comprised of autoworkers. Dorothy Lorio, a Brookwood graduate and one of the 1937 Chautauqua booking agents, attended the show and reported that the autoworkers “simply went wild” in seeing the selected material, a response that was to be echoed consistently throughout the season (Lorio 6 March 1937). Brookwood’s shows were successful because they were created and enacted by workers with a range of working class experiences who were interested in unveiling and solving social problems and who came from, and could therefore relate 140 to, similar (if not the very) audiences they performed in front of. With guidance from Brookwood’s dramatics instructors, these worker-students learned to translate their experiences and sculpt current events into contemporary, relevant, accessible dramatic material that achieved popular approval, although it wasn’t until Sit-Down! that Brookwood triumphed in gaining both popular approval and critical acclaim, suggesting the way the establishment was perhaps overly wedded to traditional definitions of playwrights since Titus was a professional playwright. Brookwood on the March with Sit-Down! Having William Titus’ Sit-Down! at the center of Brookwood’s 1937 Chautauqua nationalized the pro-striker side of the sit-down struggle between General Motors and its employees to major industrial centers from Long Island and Boston to Toledo and Milwaukee. This worker-centric version of employer/employee contest was one that major news sources had been reluctant to report as the strike unfolded and victory was more remote than reachable. During the strike, news sources were unsurprisingly precautionary about overtly speaking out against General Motors, which at the time was one of the nation’s largest and most profitable companies. Strategically, perceived slander could have a trickle down effect and jeopardize much-needed GM advertising revenue streams, which was an unnecessary risk if the ragtag army of militant sit-downers had fulfilled probability and proved to be little more than a failed coup. The Chautauqua’s working-class attendees were certainly familiar with the rough details of “the strike” as it was still known and certainly the grand finale win, but the drilldown details were no doubt unknown to wider crowds given the more tempered news coverage in major sources. 141 As a factually-based play that covered everything from the seedlings of discontent to strike execution and the sustenance of morale, Sit-Down! provided a how-to guide or template for sit-downs 29 . This visual template motivated and inspired audiences as labor theatre and a lesson in worker education on staging strikes. Witnessing the strikers’ sweet success allowed audiences to participate in and experience second-hand the afterglow and glamour that accompanied the actual win. However, the play was not without controversy. It was characterized as a risk by some potential audiences because it dealt with such a recent and epic strike campaign that was still commonly referred to as “the strike,” even though hundreds had occurred in the interim. The actual flurry of real-life sit-downs spurred by victory over GM and the local recreation of that story via performance raised some fear-driven hackles about the presentation of the play. Such a response suggests a recognition of the acute power of theatre since officials for some potential union venues clearly feared workers would see the play, awaken to a recognition of their own injustices, and stage a sit-down since their viewing left them feeling sufficiently armed with strategy and fired up with resolve. Sit-Down! not only actualized the fantasy ending of union recognition present in the Brookwood Chautauqua’s 1935 play Model 7A, but heightened that fantasy since Titus’ play was a living document based on actual history, suggesting that success by the auto workers could be replicated across industries. Sit-Down! also offered Michigan workers, especially those in Flint, a 29 Again, given I have not seen anything more than a passing comment on Titus’ play, all of the analysis is original. 142 forum to review their own event with the certainty of a known outcome. While Herbst, Vorse and Kraus’ coauthored play, Strike Marches On, was performed the night the plants were victoriously evacuated, it was already slated for performance that evening, so it was simply added to the roster of celebratory events. The recency of current events did not allow time for revision, so the ending that had been written as hopefully triumphant, but non-specific in terms of timing or tracing trigger points to success, was given specificity by attendees who filled in the blanks with their own experience and became coauthors. Audiences for Sit-Down! did not have to impose the experience of the win onto the ending to create specificity. The steel community proved to be the most hesitant about committing to performances of Sit-Down!. The triumphant win against General Motors on February 11, 1937 followed by the subsequent sit-down fever that swept the nation triggered a tidalwave surge in CIO membership, which exponentially increased union leverage and visibility and stimulated cross-industry corporate fears over the costs of a sustained strike. The General Motors strike had cost the company the production of nearly 300,000 cars, valued at $175 million, and GM’s market share of new passenger car sales dropped precipitously by 10 percent from the first quarter of 1936 to the first quarter of 1937 30 when the sit-down was in full-force (Fine 305). With the February 1 seizure of Flint’s Chevrolet No. 4, GM’s sole producer of Chevrolet engines, already severely depressed production rates ground to a near halt, and the company was only able to produce 151 cars in the first ten days of February until the resolution of the 30 General Motors’ market share of new registrations for passenger car dropped from 44.40% in Q1 of 1936 to 34.37% in Q1 of 1937 (Fine 305). 143 strike. Employers across industries took proactive, seemingly preventative steps and mimicked some of the autoworker wins for their own employees by raising wages and reducing hours in the hopes of avoiding their own workforce sitting down. Consequently, even workers who didn’t strike in many cases benefited from the national flurry of sit-downs. A calculated move by CIO leader John L. Lewis in steel continued the domino effect of union growth; Lewis’s nascent negotiations with steel companies that had begun during the Flint strike were rapidly brought to fruition. On March 2, 1937, U.S. Steel agreed to recognize the CIO’s Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC), an agreement that was negotiated behind closed doors and without a single sit-down (Dubofsky and Van Tine 199). The fact such an agreement was reached just three weeks after the conclusion of the February sit-down points to the enormous leverage workers gained nationally in the aftermath of the GM sit-down and the correspondingly epic shift in corporate mentality as many companies prepared to secede to workers in ways they had long delayed or never imagined. The following month, in April 1937, another giant would tumble as Chrysler recognized the UAW to end the month-long sit-down in their plants. Strike plans were clearly being made long before the March strike start since Chrysler had sent union representatives to Flint during the sit-down to study strike tactics (Fine 328). March also corresponded with Brookwood’s initial planning for their summer tour route and negotiations for summer Chautauqua stops. As Brookwood booking agents instigated their annual correspondence with proposed stops in steel territory that had become so routine as to be nearly unquestioned, the labor college received 144 pushback from union officials in steel regarding both the title and content of Titus’ centerpiece play. Concerns were twofold. One, that the presentation of such a play might upset or compromise the freshly minted steel contract, and two, that seeing the play might somehow rally workers into staging an unnecessary sit-down. In short, the excitement and triumph embodied in a performance of Sit-Down! might cause steel workers to feel they “missed out” and subsequently “act out” their own sit-down since their contract terms were negotiated in secret closed door meetings between John L. Lewis and U.S. Steel executive Myron Taylor without worker demonstration or input. In fact, Phil Murray, the CIO’s director of the steel organizing campaign, was not involved in, or even informed of, the talks and was shocked by news of the negotiated contract. Per Lewis’s request, Murray was on hand to sign the secured agreement for the CIO, reinforcing his role within the CIO hierarchy and performing legitimacy. The consistently tentative responses from Brookwood’s steel country stops suggest a pervasive fear within the steel industry that the contract was built on shaky ground. The contract Lewis obtained for the steelworkers was not as far-reaching or impressive as the one Lewis helped negotiate between GM and the UAW. While U.S. Steel agreed to negotiate with SWOC, unlike the GM/UAW settlement, U.S. Steel refused to terminate the open shop or negotiate solely with SWOC, leaving a heightened potential for union conflicts and power struggles within the steel industry that could fracture worker loyalties and implode fragile new unions. Since steelworkers’ voices were excluded from the attainment of and agreement to the terms of the contract, employee buy-in had to be achieved after the fact, so it was 145 more a matter of rhetorical, post-strike persuasion since workers were not actively involved in achieving a communal surrender of U.S. Steel. While the final outcome of the steel contract may not have differed, or likely been less favorable with a strike, with the national rise of the working class post-Flint, tentative reactions to Brookwood from steel territory suggest steelworkers may have been disenchanted with a final contract that excluded their participation. The industry didn’t want invite performances that would fuel worker unrest or raise questions, dialogue, or possibly activism about how terms may have been more favorable if they had staged their own sit-down and experienced the solidarity of their autoworker brethren. Steel union officials were clearly sensitive to lingering “what if” scenarios and attendant feelings of possibly being “cheated out” of participation in the struggle, especially when steelworkers had suffered such harsh repercussions for earlier, failed strikes where workers had risked much and gained little. The CIO and accompanying unions were no doubt aware that Lewis’s contract, while cause for celebration in the toppling of a steel giant, left unsatiated any psychological needs for a satisfying counter to events like the Homestead strike, not to mention more recent defeats, such as an unsuccessful bid for unionization in 1934. In an April 14, 1937 letter to Brookwood, attorney Albert Block, representing the Gary, Indiana SWOC CIO, speaks candidly and explicitly about local trepidation regarding the prospect of a Brookwood production of Sit-Down!. Block writes, “The C.I.O. having signed a contract with the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. does not want to encourage sit-down strikes, here at any rate, and would be opposed to propaganda to that end. However, if the play was one on union organization, and the sit-down was 146 only incidental, they would be pleased to have it play in Gary” (Block 14 April 1937). The central question is one of degree as Block readily admits the group isn’t opposed to representations of unionization or even a sit-down, but only in small doses. The suggestion is that too much emphasis on and performance of the sit-down, as Titus’ title explicitly suggests will be the play’s focal point, could in fact incite one. This raises the question of how much representation is too much and what are the assessable trigger points regarding what will or will not be enough to tip off workers. Unlike most Brookwood correspondence, which was answered by office staff, Block’s letter was personally and immediately responded to by Brookwood’s director, Tucker P. Smith, only five days after Block mailed his missive. Tucker acknowledges Block’s concerns as well as those of the larger steel community and notes Brookwood has anticipated such concerns and accordingly the players “are prepared to give three different versions of the play ‘Sit-Down’ emphasizing slightly different angles of the auto strike depending upon what seems to be best for each local situation” (Smith 19 April 1937). However, Smith notes he can currently only send the original version, which he carefully emphasizes was prepared for and approved by the auto unions. Seeking approval from the auto unions suggests the original version was aiming for absolute authenticity and reinforces this will not be the version presented to the steel workers. Smith also notes the Brookwood Players will be performing for steel audiences in Pittsburgh, an implicit reference to the safety of the show for Gary’s steel audiences since Pittsburgh was the signing site of the March 2 nd U.S. Steel/SWOC agreement. This strategic reference to another worker population that’s 147 sensitive about representations of sit-downs is clearly geared to increase the comfort level in Gary, and Tucker notes Brookwood is only interested in “presenting a program that will help local efforts” (Smith 19 April 1937). Tucker also notes the title Sit-Down! was selected since “it has the greatest publicity and is short and catchy” (Smith 19 April 1937). Tucker’s strategic spin on the title tries to mitigate the fact the play is about the sit-down in the auto industry, which had become THE sit-down post-UAW win, so the title’s strategic marketing is also a summation of its content. Gary, Indiana steel interests weren’t the only ones with concerns about the play and its name. In McKeesport, Pennsylvania, located just southeast of Pittsburgh, the May 3, 1937 Brookwood Chautauqua was sponsored by the Ladies Auxiliary of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. In a letter to Brookwood confirming the show, Ladies Auxiliary coordinator Joan Powers notes “Because of the peculiar situation at the moment in McKeesport, we have taken the liberty to change the name (for advertising purposes only) of the feature play from ‘Sit-Down’ to ‘Labor on the March’ (Powers undated). Unknowingly, Powers adopted the play’s early draft title, which was ultimately exchanged for the more direct Sit-Down!. In some cases, fears about the show’s content pervaded beyond steel country stops, and anxieties about the performance sparked censorship. A March 27, 1937 article in Reading, Pennsylvania’s Reading Times reports that the local school board voted against allowing the Brookwood Labor Players to perform their April 21 st show at the junior high, offering nothing more specific than “unsettled labor conditions” as the vague rationale, even though the troupe had previously performed at the same 148 venue without incident (Reading Times). George Rhodes as president of the sponsoring organization, the Federated Trades Council, is quoted in the article as saying, “Such reasoning is unbecoming people at the head of an educational institution, who should be first to welcome discussion and portrayal of facts. One of the skits will dramatize the sit-down strike. Surely nobody should be harmed by understanding of Labor’s point of view on this modern method of conducting a labor dispute” (Reading Times). Rhodes’ point is such a decision is anathema to the exploration of ideas that should be a foundational tenet of education. Rhodes goes even further in describing the play as the “portrayal of facts,” which highlights the conservative, close-mindedness of the school board members, casting them as actively anti-education. More broadly, the school board’s vote externalizes fears about the power of performance, especially when it’s paired with social conditions in flux. The Brookwood performance represents a danger in dramatically presenting the sit-down, and the school wants to avoid any blame for being instrumental in kicking off any local, post-performance labor strife or activism as the venue provider. Such a decision acknowledges the fear that activism can be triggered by witnessing socially relevant dramatic entertainment, especially with the sit-down methodology sweeping the nation. Interestingly, Block ends his letter to Brookwood with the sentence, “Personally, I don’t like this censorship, especially by the working man, but the unions do have some merit in their position” (Block 14 April 1937). This tagged on final sentence, while working against the letter’s larger purpose, provides an outside perspective and a strategic alignment with Brookwood, regardless of the content they 149 bring to Gary. It also positions Block as an ally in recommending a Brookwood show to the local CIO chapter. While begrudgingly referencing the potential merits of precaution, in explicitly calling out “especially by the working man,” Block suggests duplicity and censorship is expected by government or big business, but the working man should have a responsibility for presenting the truth. After all, withholding information was a chief complaint against the corporations, so Block suggests the nascent union is already guilty of information control in deciding what will be best for its members. The union situation in steel was obviously more fraught with internal turmoil than that in the auto industry, which makes sense because the union win was handed down from the top instead of grown from the worker base, a base that had grown cautious of unions after suffering devastating losses in previous union efforts. Block’s correspondence and the concerns of other steel communities, such as McKeesport, Pennsylvania, clearly struck a chord at Brookwood and instigated preventative communication. On April 27 th , only eight days after he responded to Block, Tucker Smith contacted Phil Murray, the CIO’s director of steel organizing, who had signed the March 2 nd agreement between U.S. Steel and SWOC that Lewis negotiated. In his letter, Smith briefs Murray on the current Brookwood season and invites him to the Players’ upcoming May 2 nd performance in East Pittsburg. Smith specifically addresses concerns from steel country about the representation of strikes and sit-downs and notes Brookwood has “taken this into account in presenting our program” (Smith 27 April 1937). Smith goes on to reference Sit-Down! and resituate it in more conducive framing for steel country. Smith carefully avoids deconstructing his claims about the play’s sensitivity to steel crowds by eliding the play’s actual 150 name and instead strategically refers to it as one “of the main popular numbers” (Smith 27 April 1937). Such careful word choice avoids uncomfortable confrontations with naming and allows Smith to affirm the play’s positive audience feedback. Smith emphasizes the outcome of unionization over the sit-down methodology in outlining the play’s focus as “the growth of the automobile union” and also asserts it will be of “general labor interest to workers everywhere” (Smith 27 April 1937). By soliciting Murray’s attendance, Smith seeks implicit top-down support from steel. However, the production he invites Murray to is for electrical workers who were undoubtedly presented with the full version and given title, so Murray would be exposed on-site to the full scope of Brookwood’s 1937 project. At that point, Smith undoubtedly hoped the CIO’s steel director would be swept up by the crowd’s expected enthusiasm and would recognize the depth, value, and quality of the play and consequently endorse it. Correspondence references to the three versions of the text are fairly common, and similar oft-repeated comments about only being able to send the auto industry- approved version accompany each statement. While Tucker cannot include the appropriate version of the play with his reply, his answer reassuringly notes the appropriate text can be supplied to suit local needs. The utter acceptance of textual fluidity is reminiscent of the large degrees of improvisation in the February 11 th production of Strike Marches On in Flint that correlated with the strike win and plant evacuation. Brookwood’s desire to accommodate audiences and guarantee a booking supersedes any institutional concerns about textual integrity. However, this is fitting given the school’s goals of promoting the formation of local theatre; they modeled 151 their own philosophy of adaptation and doing what fit for each venue and clearly weren’t wedded to authorial integrity since they often revised earlier plays for recirculation. At the beginning of the 1937 Chautauqua season, Brookwood didn’t hesitate to peddle excerpts of the unfinished Sit-Down! to local union test audiences and perform what became a feedback workshop for the coming season. The inability to produce the requested alternate versions also suggests the realization for alternate versions of the play was a belated awakening that may have only came to light with the request for such versions and was then quickly accommodated post-request. The chronic inability to produce alternate versions, even when requested, suggests there may have not been a documented, written version and certain scenes may have just been improvisionally cut, which means the feared action-inducing sit-down theme may still have been more pervasive than desired. The fact that the only exigent copy of the text is clearly the auto-approved version supports this thesis. The title is Sit- Down!, and the play’s focus on the GM sit-down is untempered and unwavering. Fitting audience needs and maintaining relevance is ultimately the most important mission, and Smith ends his reply to Block by describing the Brookwood Players in the negative as a group that isn’t “interested in achieving theatrical success but are a basic part of the college interested in contacting workers to believe in the progressive and united labor movement” (Smith 19 April 1937). Smith affirms the ideological alignment in mission and purpose between the players and the college that is centered on promoting progressiveness in the labor movement. 152 Brookwood Beyond the Worker-Student: In Dialogue with Professional Workers’ Theatres Brookwood occupied a unique, hybrid position in the theatre world by bridging the working class and professional theatre worlds. Brookwood hired drama instructors from the workers’ theatre movement, such as Jasper Deeter from the Provincetown Theatre, and performed at professional workers’ theatres like New York’s Labor Temple and Philadelphia’s New Theatre League. But Brookwood also had broad, direct access to working class experiences via both Chautauqua union audiences and their own students (and consequently their playwrights and actors) who came directly from the laboring population and could recast their experiences as dramatic material. Such chronic and varied worker contact gave Brookwood a sharp sense of what working class crowds responded favorably to, and the school’s theatrical offerings, while changing from year to year, always centered around major current events that were important for labor. In his article on labor colleges, Richard Altenbaugh draws a false binary between Brookwood as a northern labor college whose urban setting led to plays with urban themes and Commonwealth College as a southern institution (located in Mena, Arkansas) whose rural locale determined rural themes for their plays. Altenbaugh’s one sample play from each institution is scant evidence for a weak claim and ultimately, assigns reason to the wrong cause. Brookwood, while 60 miles outside of New York City, was actually very rural, and the school’s primary tactic was to base plays on current events that were meaningful to the audiences they typically performed for. Such audiences were more commonly industrial laborers since such workers were more geographically 153 consolidated and could be more easily advertised to and gathered. In addition, Brookwood’s Chautauqua tours typically traveled closer to “home base” through the north and northeast where there were higher concentrations of industrial workers. While Brookwood did have students who were farmers, the higher total proportion of the workforce in industrial and service jobs was reflected in the student body. Also, farmers were often unable to leave for the prolonged periods required for academic study, which was more feasible in industries that were more mechanized or relied less on specific individuals. While Brookwood was more than willing to cater to their Chautauqua audiences and adapt their material as needed, it would be foolish to say they were as myopic as to not see beyond art for education’s sake and didn’t strive for artistic merit or value with their plays. While their rhetoric was worker-oriented, they were certainly cognizant of and in dialogue with the larger, professional workers’ theatre community and strove for a place within that community. Much like the Flint strike that inspired Titus’ play, Sit-Down! itself achieved a rare success. It was enthusiastically received by its target audience of laborers and unions but was also approved and immediately touted as a gem by the professional workers’ theatre community. Philadelphia’s New Theatre League was known for its cutting edge, politically radical theatre, and the league immediately commissioned Sit-Down! for publication. In January 1935, the League of Workers’ Theatres (LOWT), which had been established in 1932, became the New Theatre League, and by March 1935, the New Theatre League had committed to promoting theatre schools for workers. Consequently, the connection to and commitment to Brookwood was not surprising 154 since Brookwood was the foremost labor college and was commonly credited for being instrumental in the spread of the workers’ theatre movement (McDermott 77). Brookwood did not hesitate to reference Titus’ accolades from the professional community or the play’s impending publication in promotional materials for the 1937 Chautauqua season when they thought it would be to their advantage. While Brookwood was worker-based in both student body and Chautauqua attendees, their relative proximity to New York and hiring of professional workers’ theatre drama instructors kept them connected to the more mainstream, professional workers’ theatre community. Immediately before the opening of the 1936 summer Chautauqua season, Brookwood hosted a Workers’ Theatre Conference at their campus on Sunday, March 29 th where the specific topic was “technical and creative problems of workers’ theatre” and which was attended by a range of representatives from the workers’ theatre movement (England 10 March 1936) 31 . The fact the conference specifically named and differentiated between “technical and creative problems” suggests the two prongs of concern within the workers’ theatre movement. Attendees and conference participants, while weighted towards theatre professionals, also included labor union supporters. The conference included ten speakers, including representatives from Brookwood, the labor union community, and the professional workers’ theatre world, including playwrights, actors, theatre organizers and arts magazine journalists. 31 Like much of the material in this chapter, this discussion is original. I have actually never even seen reference made to this conference. There’s only one folder dedicated to it (Box 10, Folder 19) in the Brookwood Collection at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther library. Since Brookwood’s director, Tucker P. Smith, was out of town during the conference, he typed up his speech to be shared, which is in the folder. Conference organizer and Brookwood drama instructor Elizabeth England kept notes on each speaker, which she typed up and which are also available in the folder. 155 Brookwood’s two presenters were drama instructor Elizabeth England and college director Tucker P. Smith, who left a typed speech to be read in his absence. Fannia Cohn, from the Educational Department of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), was first to speak. Cohn was also a playwright in addition to serving as vice president of Brookwood’s labor directors board, so she was closely tied to the school and was a nearly perfect representative in her triumvirate of support for theatre, workers’ rights, and labor college education. In fact, during the subsequent Chautauqua season when Brookwood was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and impending closure, a reality that was to befall the institution in fall 1937, Tucker Smith approached the ILGWU about sponsoring Brookwood, which would have ended the school’s era as non-union affiliated, a plea that was ultimately rejected as the ILGWU undoubtedly didn’t want to absorb the financial burden of shouldering Brookwood’s operating expenses. New York City’s Theatre Union, the most left-leaning of the professional workers’ theatre companies of the time, featured heavily in the conference program with three speakers, only naming two of them – labor organizer turned Theatre Union publicity manager Margaret Larkin and Theatre Union cofounder and playwright Albert Maltz. Other speakers in the line-up included Herbert Kline, editor-in-chief of New Theatre magazine, and Samuel Friedman from Rebel Arts, a New York City Socialist Party arts group. While not mentioned on the program line-up, Friedman also served on the Theatre Union’s executive board. Notable attendees included writer Sidney (or S.J.) Perelman, brother-in-law of 1930’s novelist Nathanael West who authored Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and A Cool Million (1934). Perelman was the 156 screenwriter for biting, sharp-witted Marx Brothers hits like Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932) in addition to writing regularly for The New Yorker. Perelman’s presence speaks to Brookwood’s deep reach and that discussions about productive ways to communicate with working class audiences was not just a theoretical, academic question to be entertained by a small group of committed theatre ideologues but had a broad reach in terms of interest. What stands out most clearly from the detailed conference notes recording the day’s events is that even in the context of a content-specific conference about something as inherently collaborative as theatre, particularly workers’ theatre, presenters ironically focused on the primacy of their own roles as individual contributors. Among such a diverse range of participants who were leaders in the field, there were relatively narrow boundaries on fleshing out discussions of theatrical elements and viewpoints that could contribute to the overall goal of building the workers’ theatre movement and productive troubleshooting of the currently identified issue set. What is instead memorialized is each person’s eagerness to validate the centrality of their role, as well as emphasize how uncomplementary efforts in other equally important roles diminish their contributions and consequently, detract from the whole. The tone is reminiscent of Elizabeth England’s argument against a compulsory Chautauqua as contaminating the experience of truly dedicated participants. The focus remains on the individual, and in this case, the involuntary compromises of the individual while failing to examine or realize that the very self- serving, ego-induced behavior being modeled was counterproductive to and 157 detracting from the larger conference mission of addressing technical and creative problems. While there was not any overt finger-pointing or blame-laying of specific failure points, such self-serving monologue was no doubt inconducive to the creation of a safe haven for open, honest dialogue and creative problem solving. Such ego emphasis not only overshadowed, but actively damaged, the learning opportunities of the larger collective. It effectively reshifted the conference purpose’s to reinforcing the limitations and hardships of one’s own subject position rather than being open to listening and learning, which reinforces actor vs. playwright binaries and sets up workers’ theatre for failure. For example, actor Will Geer of the Let Freedom Ring Acting Group was nearly comical in a pitch that amounted to little more than a veiled call for more actor coddling as he noted, “One of the difficulties with the ordinary actor in the labor theatre is his attitude toward the employer. Unless he is handled very carefully, he feels that he is treated better up-town and does not cooperate properly. The older actor finds it impossible to join in a collective” (England Notes on Speeches 8). Geer fails to assign a rationale to his claim about older actors being inherently incapable of collective participation, and he manages to negate workers’ theatre by chalking it up to comparatively subpar working conditions. His contribution to the conference’s driving question of solutions to creative and technical problems amounts to nothing more than the vague and insubstantial plea to tread lightly around actors since their participation in workers’ theatre is little more than an act of charity ready to be rescinded on a moment’s notice. 158 Theatre Union cofounder and playwright Albert Maltz was one of the few speakers who was able to move beyond his own subject matter expert status. Maltz did plant his flag in calling for financial support for playwrights, which was certainly not as outrageous as Geer’s plea since a dearth of viable plays was a chronic pain point and issue for concern within the workers’ theatre movement and one that Maltz himself addresses. However, Maltz also communicated strategic vision and a big- picture viewpoint in paralleling the workers’ theatre movement to the labor movement and brings perspective in saying one could make the claim that neither movement has an audience. Yet, the Theatre Union reached 250,000 of the 4-5 million workers in the New York City area during its first year, a point Maltz reinforces by saying, “One could also say that there is no labor movement, but 12% of the workers are organized. Yet the people in Akron knew there was a labor movement during the rubber strike. So both are true. There is no labor theatre, and yet there is one” (England Notes on Speeches 6). In explicitly connecting labor and theatre, Maltz makes the point that gradual growth should not be mistaken for negative growth or failure to progress and that the benchmark numbers for the current gradual growth are not nearly as bleak as they’re made out to be. Maltz also depersonalizes and disassociates from his connection with the Theatre Union in saying that the decline or even demise of that particular entity is irrelevant (and the Theatre Union would close later in 1937) and not illustrative of a general trend because even if it closes, another theatre will rise in its place to advance similar objectives. The larger movement is more important than any one institution’s growth or collapse. In this way, Maltz follows a sort of capitalist model in accepting the rise 159 and fall of businesses as natural and inevitable. However, since the business is just a structured mechanism for idea sharing and advancement, the name attached to it at any given point is largely irrelevant if the focus remains the same. Since Tucker Smith was absent during the conference, the five and a half pages of typed notes he left behind to be read in his absence provide the most detail of any participant. Smith proves transparent about the constraints and rationales for workers’ theatre, and the title of his talk “Plays as Teaching Devices” clearly delineates his thesis, which hinges around two keywords: authenticity and sophistication. Smith notes that since Brookwood plays are student-developed, the quality may be somewhat compromised, but that is compensated for by “sincerity, conviction, and considerable understanding” (Smith 3), rephrasing and reinforcing the messaging on the 1936 promotional brochure for the Chautauqua, which stated, “What Brookwood plays lack in finish, these players make up in earnestness” (Brookwood Labor Players Program). In presenting to the very union populations who are often the subjects of Brookwood plays, the students (some of whom came from those industries) have to gain an in-depth understanding of labor issues. Generating an authentic text that can be performed and accepted by those it represents also advances students’ own labor education. The impact goes beyond research for factual authenticity to capturing emotional authenticity. Smith notes, “The preparation and presentation of plays does things, emotionally, to the actors. It compels them to arrive at a deeper appreciation of the emotional forces in labor struggles and in labor audiences. They inevitably find a new dignity in their lives and in the seemingly modest efforts of their fellows. The class struggle becomes a great 160 drama, consciously” (Smith 2). Smith stresses authenticity as opposed to realism since all of Brookwood’s texts end in triumph or at least strong hope. Emotional authenticity serves as a portal to labor struggle as a drama, so such authenticity was necessary to create emotional resonance and consequently, spark action in audiences. Smith notes theatre brings in the highest revenues and can combine entertainment with education, thereby drawing larger crowds than lectures or other educational tools are more overtly didactic since theatre constructs issues in human terms. Smith does stretch the truth in terms of all content being student-generated. In earlier seasons, the Chautauqua line-up included both student-generated and professional plays that were labor sympathetic. For example, Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward, which takes place in an Irish poorhouse, was part of the 1934 Chautauqua season, but dependency on outside contributions did wane over time, and Workhouse Ward was indeed the last professional play used by the Chautauqua. In subsequent seasons, content was student-generated, although in the 1937 season, all of the plays were written by dramatics instructor Bill Titus as the school’s siloed labor dramatics program deviated programmatically in stepping away from student- derived content. Smith ends his speech by encouraging New York-based performers and playwrights to look outward in scope from Greenwich Village to Main Street. However, addressing those site-specific needs is not a matter of simply modifying advertising or hitting the road. The ability to address Main Street in terms that will be accepted and understood by that community necessitates a fundamental readjustment in approach from professional theatre practitioners. Early in his speech, Smith notes, 161 “Most labor plays I have seen produced in New York City are over the heads of the average American worker and would probably not rebook” (Smith 3). Rebookings and positive word of mouth were the lifeblood of Brookwood’s Chautauqua program, so Smith speaks as someone with an acute sense of what workers respond favorably to. However, one must question to what extent he’s underselling his audience in light of the range of worker achievements during the Flint sit-down. In the context of the free time generated by the sit-down, many workers, not to mention the women in their lives, realized the expansive range of their own potential, be it in strategizing, organizing plant defense, or performing in plays like Strike Marches On. Smith repeatedly emphasizes that Brookwood’s audiences are unsophisticated, and this unsophistication is at odds with the New York workers’ theatre movement since Smith explicitly notes that the current New York offerings are not geared towards the very audiences they are intended to portray and reach. Creating plays that appealed to both theatre-going audiences, which were more common in urban settings with the population density to feasibly support theatre, and non-theatre-going working class audiences of more rural, Main Street America is a fine line that was rarely straddled successfully, making the success of Sit-Down! even more noteworthy. Having Brookwood’s plays be primarily written by students guaranteed they would not be out of touch or inappropriate for working class audiences since student- generated content was in fact worker-generated content. Titus’ Sit-Down!, which was Brookwood-created, but by an instructor, culled a successful bridging of professional praise and acceptance by the unsophisticated audiences Smith references. Smith’s multiple references to the unsophistication factor of common workers resonated with 162 the claims of the New York attendees at the conference but were damaging in perpetuating an academic/laborer binary. Brookwood’s mission explicitly affirmed the necessity and benefits of worker education, and their graduates proved it out, but this was at odds with Smith’s disparaging comments about the lack of sophistication among the working class, making the school’s own student body either a talented minority that Smith views as exceptions, or he’s little better at giving credit than the very New York bias he’s critiquing. This is not to say attracting audiences is easy, and it’s certainly still a contemporary, relevant problem for today’s struggling theatres, but Smith’s bias as he actively worked to build a labor community while also giving them very little credit for sophistication fostered a double standard, and his elitism may have been perceived by the very audiences Brookwood was trying to attract. Even if it wasn’t, Smith damages the greater workers’ theatre movement by playing into New York elitism and giving them the advice to basically “dumb down” their material to gain wider distribution, which counters other contributors like Maltz who referenced the wide 250,000 person viewer base of the Theatre Union’s first production, which was a professional, New York-based production. Tucker portrays the Chautauqua as financed solely and sustainably by audiences with a $25 per show fee, plus half of the net proceeds (if there were ticket sales, etc.) and local lodging for the players. While Brookwood’s audience-supported model was viable, internal records show the actual margins weren’t quite as optimistic as Tucker’s spiel, especially since this model required nightly performances, which weren’t realistic. The program was plagued by financial crisis since the cost to lodge the players if they had an open night meant it was better to 163 have some performance than none, which often resulted in the troupe appearing on conditions that did not meet the regular contract. Foremost, this provided little leverage for enforcing the actual contract for future rebookings. Lodging was never an issue since that did not require actual payment, only coordination with local volunteers, but the pricing elasticity compromised seasonal monetization and jeopardized program sustainability since the fee fluctuated from full to reduced to flat to none, and the zero fee model limited the troupe to an on-site verbal pitch and the passing of the proverbial hat for collection only. With a large percentage of accommodated fee structures, the break-even margins from full-price shows were not enough for the summer Chautauqua to operate without deficit. The conference concluded with dinner and a preview of the 1936 Chautauqua season line-up by the Brookwood Players, which was only two weeks shy of its April 13 th start date. While there are no reaction notes for the performance, this program is the only one I ever found where the plays, two in this case, had the author’s names appear next to them. Author’s names were excluded from the list of plays for sale as well as the regular season programs since they weren’t useful leverage in promoting sales to unions and their absence emphasized collective accomplishment over individual recognition, a key concept to build in the labor movement. For a professional audience, authorial contribution would be more salient, so this program adjusted to that interest and also ironically mirrored the day’s rallying focus on individual contributors. Two members of the 1936 Chautauqua would be directly involved with the Flint sit-down just months later. Frank Winn would become the CIO publicist for the 164 Flint sit-down (Pesotta 243). Another performer would shortly marry Roy Reuther, who had enrolled at Brookwood in 1933, was an instructor at Brookwood for the 1935-36 season, and managed a Chautauqua troupe in both the 1935 and ‘36 seasons. Roy was the first labor organizer assigned to the Flint area whose credibility was boosted as a former autoworker, and he became an influential leader and trusted strategist during the Flint sit-down. Roy’s brother, Victor, was also a Brookwood graduate and another key organizer in the Flint sit-down who often manned the sound car, shouting out instructions, warnings, and encouragement to the sit-downers. As sound car operator, Victor was one of seven charged with inciting the January 11 Battle of Bull’s Run, which in fact was instigated by the Flint police, and Victor wasn’t freed and cleared of all charges until June 2 (Special Prosecutor 1). A third Reuther brother, Walter, while never a Brookwood student and not as integrally involved with the Flint sit-down since he was in neighboring Detroit at the time, would go on to serve over 25 years as the president of the United Auto Workers. Rose Pesotta, a sweatshop worker who became the sole female vice-president of the ILGWU, recommended Frank Winn as CIO publicist, and she made several trips to Flint during the sit-down. In her memoir written years later, Pesotta specifically calls out how the positive benefits of a Brookwood education were leveraged to aid the larger strike efforts (243). A post-conference press release emphasized the air of confidence pervading the conference, which while fitting with the genre of public relations, also once again points to Brookwood’s desire to manage perceptions. While correctly naming Albert Maltz as one of the most optimistic presenters, the press release casts an 165 unrealistically rosy glow on the conference, particularly since presenters like Louis Schaeffer of the Labor Stage descended into hopelessness with unquoted absolutes like “There is a no labor audience for the theatre” and chalked up the success of the Theatre Union to novelty-driven fluke (England Notes on Speeches 1). A New Kind of History: Workers Record the Sit-Down via Theatre The win of the Flint sit-downers certainly gave hope and courage to workers across the country as well as stimulated faith in the protection afforded by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers the right to unionization and collective bargaining. These workers saw the success of the autoworkers and many took long-imagined action against their own employers and triggered a tidal wave of thousands of subsequent ’37 sit-downs; in Detroit alone there were nearly 30 strikes and almost 5,000 workers idled in the two weeks after the UAW win (Frank 75). The success of the Flint autoworkers also indoctrinated the integral role of theatre and performance as the next waves of sit-downers looked to the actions of the Flint sit-down as a model for their own strike in hoping that mimicry would achieve similar success for their venture. The play as historical record, seen throughout the Flint sit-down in skits from the entertainment committee to the grand finale of Strike Marches On, was adopted as a way to record the strike in a format that could be represented back to the very audiences whose achievements it recorded but could also be shared and distributed as a way to communicate technique and spread the word in what may have been the first viral marketing campaign, creating a distribution channel for workers to learn from and inspire each other. This trickle down theatre effect was solidified even more by Brookwood’s Chautauqua 166 tour, which memorialized and reanimated February’s current events just weeks after the strike’s conclusion since Titus’ play used real names and chronologically tracked strike events. Brookwood’s goal of encouraging local theatre gained traction in the wake of the Flint success since other worker groups desired to emulate their Flint predecessors and have their own story travel. Like Titus’s Sit-Down!, these new plays were both motivating and instructive. They followed an outline that became a trope for the telling of labor’s injustice by first establishing a demoralizing pattern of corporate injustice and unanswered worker strain, which ultimately led to collective awareness of prolonged injustice, which in turn stimulated the collective action of a sit-down as corrective action. These plays either ended with the moment of calling the sit-down, implying a positive resolution, or played out the narrative to the strike’s win. One of Detroit’s February sit-downs was a 7-day strike carried out by Woolworth’s all-female employees. Two CIO union organizers who had been involved with the Flint strike helped the women carry out strike logistics and negotiations as well as organize themselves into eight committees. While the committees overlapped to some extent with their Flint brethren, they were generally more feminine in nature due to both demographics and the sit-in space of Woolworth’s being naturally more self-contained and conducive to the reaccommodations necessary to make it a residence than an auto plant. For instance, there was less of a need for security than in the Flint sit-down since the store’s entry points for company infiltration were more limited than in a massive auto manufacturing plant. One of the new committees was Cheer-Up whose members 167 served as morale boosters (Frank 88), a seemingly light duty but a critical one for the purposes of the strike’s success since defectors or internally low morale could spread quickly and the risk of internal dissent could jeopardize solidarity and the opportunity for a win. The autoworkers’ Entertainment Committee was recreated by the Woolworth’s women who organized for the musicians’ union to perform free nightly concerts where the women would dance, and in an article about the Woolworth’s strike, Dana Frank notes, “The Entertainment Committee organized ‘impromptu entertainment’ (what they were exactly we’ll just have to leave to our imaginations)” (92). Frank’s quotation marks and parenthetical comment nominalize the possible accomplishments of the group to girlish frivolity, despite mentioning the organized efforts with the musician’s union, as if the women were limited to asking others for favors. Such statements also add an air of titillation and a suggestion of voyeurism, particularly in combination with other article comments, such as “the strike was one big endless all-female slumber party of indeterminate duration. The women did each other’s nails and hair with loving affection and danced with their arms around each other’s waists” (99). While the group certainly had fun and bonded collectively in the context of collective living without the tiring hours and forced smiles of a 55-hour work week, Frank’s modern-day bacchanalian female fantasies are countered by the hard reality motivating the strike, which was posted in the Woolworth’s window where a sign read “All we want is a living wage” (98). In the focus on group hair braiding and nail painting, Frank fails to ever mention the Entertainment Committee’s crowning achievement – the writing of a 168 play documenting their experience, which was authored collectively by the Entertainment Committee and was entitled Million Dollar Babies Sit Down 32 . The play found an audience outside of Woolworth’s and went on become the first production for the Department Store Employees Union’s new dramatic department. The title came from Bing Crosby’s 1933 hit song “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store,” which made reference to Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworth fortune who was notorious for her lavish lifestyle, and her ceaselessly flamboyant spending on everything from yachts to jewels to mansions, and serial marriages to minor European royalty, none of which were well-received in the context of a Depression-era economy. Barbara Hutton as a foil validated the sit-down actions of Woolworth’s overworked, underpaid female clerks and waitresses who were exploited in exchange for what seemed to be the sustenance of Hutton’s spoiled lifestyle. The play’s main character, Barbara Nutton (which the text specifically notes is pronounced like nuthin’), plays with the infamy of Barbara Hutton and makes explicit the antithetical nature of Hutton versus Nutton, an everywoman representing the average exploited Woolworth’s worker (Entertainment Committee 1). At nine pages, the play’s ten scenes alternate between collective songs and specific illustrative actions. The play begins in media res with the strike in action as the women sing collectively, then flashes back to Nutton’s interview and hiring. We 32 Not only does Frank not mention this play as an expert on the strike, but I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere, so again, all analysis is original. I found a copy of it at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State in the Paul Sporn Collection. Sporn, a former Wayne State professor, authored a book on the Federal Theatre Project in the Midwest. As part of his work, he collected a series of non- FTP plays from the period and the region, which are now part of this collection and are undoubtedly little known since I haven’t seen note of them and since they’re an unexpected find in a collection that primarily focuses on the FTP. 169 witness her hopeful exuberance over gaining employment quickly fade as she faces an onslaught of customers and her own version of the speed-up as she’s single- handedly expected to provide instant, smiling service to a mobbed counter of customers. Barbara is scolded by her supervisor for not keeping up and is threatened with dismissal, but her mounting frustration finds an outlet when she meets a union organizer at the store. Barbara gathers her coworkers after hours to meet with the organizer and hear about the benefits of the union, a speech that culminates in the decision to sit-down. The play ends with the start of the sit-down and the rallying song of the united girls, a precursor to their success that unites the end of the play with the opening song. The first scene/song rewrites Bing Crosby’s hit as Barbara solos, then is joined by the other girls in singing, “We were selling china, till we all got wise, / Now we’re all together and we’re unionized, / Now we’re going to, stick right here until we win, girls” (Entertainment Committee 1). The ordering of the lines frame unionization as a worker-driven decision that is empowering because it is independent of the company and in fact doesn’t rely on the company, limiting Woolworth’s role to forced recognition of that which the workers have already decided on – unionization. Crosby’s original tells the story of meeting the woman who becomes his million dollar baby after selling him china at Woolworth’s. Crosby croons, “She was selling china / And when she made those eyes, / I kept buying china / Until the crowd got wise” (Crosby). In the song, selling china at Woolworth’s provides the false hope embedded in a poor job’s rags to riches fantasy by providing the flirtatious context for securing a date and by extension, a rich husband since in the 170 context of the song Crosby self-identifies as the man whose ability to buy so much china proves his wealth. The implication is the unnamed girl’s eyes, the only fragmented, disembodied detail we get about her, become even larger and more amorous as her customer clearly provides the means and meal ticket to go from five and ten cent store to million dollar baby. In the play’s rewriting of the song, it’s not the crowd who gets “wise,” which in the context of the song is simply limited to the realization that the counter transaction promises to be about more than dishes. In the play, it is the girls themselves who gain wisdom, the wisdom that the empty promise of Prince Charming coming to the china counter is little more than a dead-end fantasy and that fighting for labor reform and a living wage is the more immediate, probable, and gratifying scenario for improving one’s lifestyle that also benefits the larger working community. After all, Crosby’s song begs the question of what happens to the thousands of other Woolworth’s girls, particularly since Woolworth’s discriminatory hiring hierarchy of the cutest girls receiving counter positions and the least attractive being relegated to behind-the-scenes kitchen duty, deprived those kitchen-bound from even having the opportunity to make eyes at Bing (Frank 72). The autoworkers are invoked numerous times throughout the play, suggesting how pivotal their success was in inspiring other workers and contributing to the courage and resolve to strike. In fact, when the union organizer notices Barbara is tired and suggests she sit down, Barbara misreads her and says, “We’re not allowed to sit during working hours, and besides, -- say, you don’t mean SIT-DOWN like the auto workers did? Boy, we’d love to do that!” (Entertainment Committee 5). The words sit down have taken on a new valence, and during the group meeting, the girls 171 keep repeating the affirmative mantra, “Like the auto workers did” to each statement from the union organizer (6). The working women of Woolworth’s ultimately triumphed much like their brethren in the auto industry, winning their strike after only seven days and were recognized two days after the agreement with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC) was signed by U.S. Steel, a win that no doubt indirectly benefited the Woolworth’s workers as corporate America seemed to be dominoing under the influence of organized labor, even without a sit-down demonstration in the case of the SWOC agreement. Woolworth’s not only conceded to the sit-downers but went beyond the requested demands in a proactive strategy to forestall further labor unrest by recognizing not just the two Detroit stores on strike but all 40 of the Woolworth’s stores in Detroit (Frank 110). The immediacy of the Flint win provided greater impact regionally, particularly since some of the same organizers were available for neighboring strikes and represented strains of direct knowledge transfer. In addition, many regional workers across industries had answered the call to participate in Flint strike demonstrations at varying points when forced evacuation was imminent or police threat was high. The Brookwood Chautauqua show with Titus’ Sit-Down! tracing the strike’s narrative from the seedlings of dissent to the maturation of collective action and success increased the story’s visibility and provided a communication channel for the strike’s progress that could be mimicked both in terms of staging one’s own sit- down and documenting it theatrically. The first official stop on the 1937 Chautauaqua tour was on April 7 th in Fall River, Massachusetts where the troupe performed for Local 178 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Only two 172 months later in June 1937, the Fall River ILGWU had collectively penned their own 4-page play that gave gender specificity to Titus’ title of Sit-Down! with the modified title Sit Down Sister!. The Fall River ILGWU even maintained Titus’ exclamation point at the end of the title, giving force to this gender-specific command for labor action. The play follows Titus’ narrative structure of repetitive injustice, group recognition of a breaking point, and collective action. An April 11, 1937 article in a Boston newspaper reviewed an April 10 th Brookwood performance for the ILGWU and notes the production, with 150 attendees, was the “first play to be presented in Boston treating the subject of sit- down strikes,” reinforcing that Flint’s sit-down strike strategies were communicated more slowly the farther away one was from the strike nexus (“Sit-Strike” 33 ). As noted, Detroit workers benefited from shared labor organizing resources who had participated in the Flint strike, but the dissemination of strike strategy dropped off in correspondence to distance from the Flint epicenter, magnifying the importance of the Chautauqua’s performance of Sit-Down! in regions that were more geographically distant from Flint and were consequently not as familiar with the strike narrative. The article also notes, “As the hour neared midnight the audience was still sitting-down while it was being entertained by some real blood-and-thunder of the old melodramatic school of playwriting, which has suddenly put on a modern, stylish frock of the CIO label” (“Sit-Strike”). The use of the phrase “sitting-down” in tandem with the midnight hour suggests both audience resistance to the performance ending 33 This article is from a folder of clippings on newspaper articles on Sit-Down!. Unfortunately, the name of the paper is not included, but it is from the Boston area. I could deduce the publication date since the article references the show as “last night,” and the troupe only performed one show in Boston in the 1937 season, which was on April 10. 173 and the desire to participate in CIO trends by adopting the modern, CIO-bred language of the sit-down. Both this article and the one in the Reading Times about the school board banning the Labor Players from performing at the junior high, while taking opposite viewpoints, share the use of the word “modern” in describing the sit- down methodology. The Boston article also records audience reactions in that “there was wild applause at times, hissing at the company union villains and cheers for the CIO heroes,” categorizing reactions as aligned with the workers and the new CIO, both of whom audiences clearly identified with (“Sit-Strike”). Sit Down Sister! 34 opens with a Forelady addressing an audience of female workers on behalf of the boss, Mr. Hopkin, who is out of town and wanted her to throw a little party for the girls in his absence. The motive behind this apparent benevolence quickly crystallizes when she reveals Mr. Hopkin is at a meeting in Chicago in response to a strike there due to some “union agitators who got into our factory there and stirred up a lotta trouble among our contented employees” (Fall River ILGWU 1). This accusation of outside agitators was used in the GM strike and nearly all sit-downs; the corporate office would publicly express a sort of confused bewilderment over the strike that was unfolding and consequently blame it on foreigners, often a euphemism for Communists, who had infiltrated the company and stirred up discontent among yesterday’s happy workers. This removed responsibility from both the company and the employees, giving everyone an out to return to the status quo, while working to align public opinion with the company. 34 Like Million Dollar Babies Sit Down, Sit Down Sister! is another play I found in the Paul Sporn Collection that I’ve never seen mentioned, let alone analyzed. 174 Gathering everyone for a party is supposed to demonstrate corporate goodwill and secure loyalty, but the plan backfires since one kind gesture in the midst of a labor strike is transparently empty in the context of poor long-term treatment. The workers, who are only ever identified as 1 st worker, 2 nd worker, 3 rd worker, etc., shout out at the Forelady from the audience, boldly questioning corporate motives from the secured space of the anonymous crowd setting. The Forelady, initially collected, then increasingly more flustered, tries to deflect negativity by escalating the value of proposed corporate peace offerings from presenting first a peppermint stick, then baseball uniforms for a company team, then a make-up vanity, before culminating in a gold medal for last year’s fastest worker, Miss Florence Speed-Up. Each offering appears on stage and dances next to the Forelady, suggesting marionettes and implying the invisible strings of corporate loyalty in accepting them. When these items fail to engender loyalty, the tone shifts to become vaguely threatening as the Forelady calls out two special guards from the Smolly Detective Service who have been hired to “sit by and see that none of them Bolshevik agitators speaks to you” (Fall River ILGWU 3). What is positioned as protection is in fact supervision GM- style, as GM had an established internal spy network to report on labor organizing, having spent over a million dollars on labor espionage with the Pinkerton Detective Agency between the start of 1934 and mid-1936 while also simultaneously employing 13 other detective agencies (Fine 38), again making the success of the autoworkers all the more astounding given the forces against them. The Forelady plays her final card by bringing out the “Spirit of Far-Lee” (the name of the play’s clothing company), which is supposed to be a “sure-fire remedy” for rallying loyalty and creating 175 contentment. Instead, the employees instead call for the “union spirit” and their shouts for the forelady to get off the stage and “sit down” transform into a collective call for action as the girls sing “Sit-Down” and kick off their strike. Unlike Titus’ text, the ILGWU play only takes the strike through the moment of execution, forefronting collective recognition and action. With thousands of labor strikes across the nation in 1937 alone, a call to action for improved workers’ rights resounded and became integral to the national consciousness, and theatre provided a vehicle for self-representation as well as a framework for preservation of working class events and triumphs. Now, General Motors has fallen again, this time in filing for bankruptcy, and the UAW prepares for vast concessions in the hopes of hanging on to a fraction of their jobs and a semblance of their retirements and healthcare. Lessons about countering economic depression with the power of collective worker actions, be they theatre-based or not, have never been as relevant as they are today. 176 Chapter 4 The Messenger Matters: The Theatre Union as Professional Workers’ Theatre Versus Worker-Generated Dramatics With a ten-year lifespan from 1931-41, the Group Theatre is considered the premiere leftist theatre of the 1930’s and is the first to come to mind or mention in today’s literary and critical assessments of the period’s drama; there have been a number of books devoted to the Group Theatre’s history, including everything from memoirs by former group members to critical assessments. Notable figures who were involved with the Group Theatre, such as Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, and Clifford Odets, became major influences in film, acting, and playwriting respectively. The company’s roster of prominent members has undoubtedly contributed to the longevity of the Group Theatre in the national consciousness, simultaneously magnifying its contribution beyond its actual reach and making it bear the weight of signifying all leftist theatre of the 1930’s. However, the Group Theatre was just one of the professional workers’ theatres on New York City’s landscape of the 1930’s where this niche theatre movement most prominently thrived. The Theatre Union was founded in 1932, just one year after the Group Theatre, and the Theatre Union survived for half a decade until its forced closure due to bankruptcy in 1937. The Theatre Union was actually more leftist in its theatrical content than the Group Theatre. Despite the Theatre Union’s significant accomplishments and some lasting contributions to the theatre 177 world, there have been no books devoted exclusively to this professionally and politically diverse, radical group, so part of the purpose of this chapter is to offer an evaluation and resuscitation of the Theatre Union. The goal is not to minimize the integral role of the Group Theatre, which already has a deserved and well- documented legacy, but to complicate and nuance the representation of professional workers’ theatre of the era by looking at the Theatre Union’s contributions and goals (and evaluating their success) as an even more leftist, socially conscious theatre group. This is of critical importance because a significant volume focusing on 1930’s drama has yet to be published. Robert Shulman’s book on seminal 1930’s leftist writers offers a balanced representation of the period’s poets and fiction writers and while not neglecting women or writers of color, fails to include a single dramatist. Shulman proudly announces that 1930’s prejudices are dead and crows that the period has been literarily restored thanks to Barbara Foley’s work on proletarian fiction and Cary Nelson’s work on the period’s poetry (8). Drama is conspicuously absent from both Shulman’s table of contents and the revival accomplishment list, and its deplorable absence relegates it to continued near-invisibility, suggesting genre-based discrimination still reigns and the period’s literary resuscitation and evaluation can not yet be signed off on as a completed project. Even in Barbara Foley’s 400-plus page tome, while admittedly on fiction, drama of the period only earns a scattered total of roughly five pages, which is shockingly meager considering both the volume’s length and the fluidity with which many writers of the time genre-hopped between fiction, drama, journalism, and screenwriting. 178 The primary focus of this study to date has been looking at worker-generated theatre – be it by Brookwood, labor unions, or strike participants, be they in Flint or elsewhere, theatre that I call endangered since it’s currently only accessible in archives. It’s buried to the point of inappreciability and only sustained in text form without performance or print publication for visibility. This theatre can hardly even be called theatre since theatre implies performance whereas these plays exist only in print form, adding one more level to their endangered status. The next escalation point from endangered is extinction, and only active, preventative intervention will forestall the fall to extinction. For instance, the copy of Strike Marches On in the Paul Sporn collection at Detroit’s Walter Reuther Library is unmarked in title and unnamed in authorship. Being able to recognize this text requires an exhaustive, highly specialized knowledge base about the Flint sit-down as well as a specific interest in the role of women given the authorship and sole performance of Strike Marches On is not particularly well-documented with more than sideline commentary. Even in Sidney Fine’s voluminous 400-page history of the Flint sit- down, Strike Marches On earns only four sentences. While professionally penned, the Theatre Union’s plays focused on worker discontent and strikes, sharing the content confrontations of this now endangered worker-generated theatre. Like their worker-generated counterparts, these plays are nearly as invisible, perhaps not endangered but certainly threatened, as they’re relegated to off-site library storage 35 or the dustbins of used or rare book stores and 35 I had to travel to UC Berkeley’s off-site, off-campus storage facility to photocopy the 1937 Theatre Union play Marching Song by John Howard Lawson, one of two copies available in the United States that I could locate. 179 sites. As for performance, at present, they’re just as endangered as their worker counterparts because they have not reached the stages in recent history. If any socially aware theatre from the 1930’s reaches the stage today, it’s typically limited to Clifford Odets whose status as Group Theatre celebrity playwright has made him a monovocal voice for the period and who seems to be one of the few beneficiaries of the current recession. His sensitive portrayals of economically struggling families of the 1930’s seem less dated and more relevant in today’s collision-course economy, which ever more mirrors its historical precedent of the 1930’s 36 . Interestingly, Odets’ social family dramas with living room settings, not his (or other) plays about workers in protest are facing revival. Until the family unit is connected with a greater collective conscious in action, such as a labor movement or political activism, its effectiveness and solidarity will be limited. Worker-generated drama and plays by the Theatre Union were more focused on labor than family and limited family to a necessary support element for labor’s success (or a potential derailer for its failure). These plays left the living room where economics are a familial problem to take place outside of the home where labor change happens. Examining the efficacy of professional drama versus worker- generated dramatic content on labor and strikes will complement the goal of exploring the Theatre Union more broadly, particularly in the context of its target audience of workers. It will also allow for a discussion of how the Theatre Union’s professional theatre in fact eroded its own laudable goals of social consciousness that 36 I saw Odets’ 1935 play Paradise Lost at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland as part of the 2009 season. For the 2009-10 season in Los Angeles, both A Noise Within and L.A. Theatre Works are doing Odets’ 1935 play Awake and Sing!, which was most recently revived on Broadway in 2006. 180 the group put forth by in fact reinforcing classic working class stereotypes, such as worker gullibility and the correlation between strikes and violence. The Theatre Union: History and Innovation The Theatre Union desired to maintain the Group Theatre’s praiseworthy quality standards in acting and directing but primarily diverged from the Group Theatre in focusing solely on plays that consciously and consistently echoed the concerns of the working class. While the Group Theatre certainly addressed the working class with plays like Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which premiered on January 6, 1935 and became a runaway national and international hit, using theatre as a space for social protest and reform was not consistent across the Group Theatre’s oeuvre. The Theatre Union’s founders accurately identified a dearth of working class representation in professional theatre and worked to mitigate this absence by producing plays driven by contemporary worker’s issues and problems in an attempt to rectify (or at least destabilize) the imbalance between the majority of Americans and the minority of working class representation in professional theatre. Even the group’s chosen name, the Theatre Union, echoed with working class vocabulary of the era and became a way to express the group’s collective nature and resonate with their target audience of the working class. Even during the Theatre Union’s tenure, it never reached the pinnacle of recognition that the Group Theatre did. While never speculated on since all 1930’s professional workers’ theatres outside of the Group Theatre tend to be lumped together as analogous, I would argue the Theatre Union’s less prominent role even during its lifespan is largely due to the fact that the Theatre Union’s diverse 181 professional and political make-up more widely dispersed, and hence diffused, its influence both within and beyond its period. While the Group Theatre was composed entirely of theatre professionals, the Theatre Union was unique in that its founding members represented a hybrid that exemplified and supported their larger mission of working class representation. As workers themselves, the Theatre Union founders were divided between two groups: 1.) theatre professionals with working-class sympathies and 2.) experienced organizers (primarily political as opposed to labor organizers) who shared an interest in theatre (Maltz Retrospect 233). The Theatre Union’s legacy has partially been minimized since many executive board members and key company drivers were from outside the theatre world and consequently did not continue on to make an impact in theatre or related fields, unlike Group Theatre members such as Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Such diversity benefited the Theatre Union and widened its reach during its existence but cursed the group’s unified historical presence. Unlike other radical, leftist theatres, which tended to organize around single- party political lines, the Theatre Union was self-conscious in establishing an executive board that was as politically diverse as it was professionally ranging, and the board boasted members who were Communists, Socialists, and part of the American Workers’ Party (Hyman 45). The group’s range in political make-up was not accidental but strategically accomplished two things: it anticipated and countered Communist charges, which leftist theatre was subject to even at that time, and much like the commitment to professional diversity, political range allowed for a wider range of contacts, helping to broaden the theatre’s reach and thereby extend its 182 longevity. This is not to argue the quest for a diverse executive board was disingenuous, simply that it fulfilled multiple agendas. Like many attempts at cohering diverse points of view, the Theatre Union’s efforts were not without trial, especially since the core of original founders had a more dominantly Communist base. Socialist Party member Samuel Friedman remembers learning after the fact that he and fellow Socialist Mary Fox had been recruited to the Theatre Union to “sell the Theatre Union as a non-Communist, nonsectarian group…to the regular [non- Communist] labor movement” (qtd. in Hyman 45). Friedman remained bitter over this, but his displeasure doesn’t mean the group trivialized his opinions as expendable. Friedman narrows the group’s desire for his participation to his politics, but he was still solicited over other theatre-sympathetic Socialists, and he could indeed offer concrete contributions as the head of Rebel Arts, a New York City Socialist Party arts group. The Theatre Union was self-conscious about building a certain kind of executive board that was not controlled by a single-party point of view, illustrating diversity was something they took seriously, even if people were offended at their perceived selection based solely on political contributions when that was just part of the equation. Friedman does not account for the fact that all represented political parties discussed Theatre Union business independently. Socialist Party fringe member and Theatre Union Executive Board member Victor Wolfson “knew that Communists and Socialists each discussed Theatre Union matters among themselves” (45), which does not undercut the group’s overall efficacy but suggests that within any subculture, be it a school, office or theatre, 183 cliques form, and those groups will discuss the people and issues that unite or alienate them. One of the Theatre Union’s cofounders and central figures was playwright Albert Maltz. Maltz participated in Brookwood College’s March 1936 Workers’ Theatre Conference where he emerged as one of the few voices of reason who could move past his own subject position (England 6). Maltz advocated for the necessity of collectivism for advancing workers’ theatre, and Theatre Union cohorts Samuel Friedman and Margaret Larkin also participated in the Brookwood conference. In addition, Maltz was a member of the Communist Party and contributed two plays, Peace on Earth (coauthored with George Sklar) and Black Pit, to the Theatre Union’s production docket. Maltz later went on to write fiction and screenplays and was incarcerated as one of the Hollywood Ten, along with fellow Theatre Union contributor John Howard Lawson who cofounded the Screen Writers Guild 37 . Lawson’s or Maltz’s, who was also active in the Screen Writers Guild, roles within the Hollywood Ten are not the focus of this study. However, it’s relevant in that Maltz’s steadfastness declination to participate in House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) red-baiting as well as his refusal to report on others for his own advantage and disclaim (or claim) any involvement with the Communist Party are consistent with his outspoken nature to uphold what he deemed morally right, 37 Just to provide a little more context, the Hollywood Ten got their name and became famous for refusing to testify and name names before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, a Red-rousting regime that ruined many Hollywood careers in the 1940’s and where industry legends like director Elia Kazan, former member of the Group Theatre and the Communist Party, survived only by slaughtering the careers of dozens of others in his pointed testimony. Maltz and nine others refused to testify, were cited for contempt of Congress, served one-year prison terms, and were blacklisted in Hollywood for years after, being forced to publish under false names or via friends, if able to do that. Many of them sought long-term refuge in Mexico after their release from prison, and Maltz himself spent 12 years in Mexico after his incarceration. 184 regardless of its perceived popularity or consequences. This trait translated to sensitive portrayals of working class characters and injustice in Maltz’s writing. In Maltz’s 1947 testimony before HUAC, he argued, “if the right of any one citizen can be invaded, then the constitutional guaranties of every other American have been subverted and no one is any longer protected from official tyranny,” a concise statement that could also define Maltz’s sense of moral obligation as a writer (Testimony). Four years earlier in 1943, Maltz had addressed the League of American Writers with a speech entitled “The Citizen Writer,” which outlined his philosophies about writers and were consistent with the testimony he would give four years later before HUAC. Maltz argues, “What a writer says most often expresses what his fellows think,” illustrating his philosophy of an unambiguous, even involuntary, connection between society and the writer (Citizen 8). As a playwright of the 1930’s who was cognizant of and sensitive to working class injustice and the economic depravity of the era, Maltz could not help but reflect the injustices suffered by the working class as a writer. He goes on to note, “In all periods there have always been writers who spoke for the most humane thinking of their society, who yielded to no one their right to be vessels of truth, who saw that humanity must have liberty and the right to live in decency” (Citizen 9). Seeing himself as a “vessel of truth” suggests a rigid adherence to that which he saw as right or in need of change, and little did he know how prophetic those words would be in the context of HUAC as he remained one of numbered few who refused to give in to the probings of the Thomas committee. 185 As noted, there is no available study at present devoted to the Theatre Union, nor is there a biography of Maltz or any other significant Theatre Union founders, making it no surprise that the Theatre Union occupies slim space in 1930’s workers’ theatre history and that its plays have been subject to only peripheral mention and analysis. What does exist is a two-volume, 1,046 page oral history of Albert Maltz that was completed by oral historian Joel Gardner as part of UCLA’s Oral History Program and which represents 36 hours of recorded conversation over a period of four years (1975-79). In the brief interview history he provides, Gardner offers no indication as to why Maltz was selected as an interviewee, although Gardner’s more extended commentary on Maltz as a blacklisted writer and the fact he as an interviewer seemed to work backwards from that point in his own research and readings on Maltz suggests Maltz’s blacklisting, not his role in the Theatre Union or as a playwright, was the impetus for the work. With UCLA’s location in Los Angeles, the film industry tie-in would likely represent a stronger stimulus for documenting Maltz’s oral history than his days and work in New York theatre. Gardner notes that while he felt well prepared going into the taping sessions, “the interviewer’s preparation paled before that of the interviewee. Maltz made voluminous notes prior to each session. He cited a variety of sources, quoting directly into the tape” (Gardner xv). This is to say Maltz was not a 70-year old man rambling off the cuff into a microphone about events of 40 years prior. He had specifics to cover and thoughtfully retrieved and reviewed the necessary materials that would allow him to speak confidently and accurately about each stage of his life’s story and its interconnectedness with everything from the New York theatre scene to studio life in 186 Hollywood. The robustness of this oral history and Gardner’s assertions about Maltz’s extensive fact-checking locate this text as a fruitful germination point for reliable data about the Theatre Union, its plays and its key players as well as the theatre’s relationship to the wider social and economic issues in America at the time. Despite its documented reliability and magnitude in both size and content, I have not seen anyone engage with, or even mention, this oral history, leaving it to make its debut and finally lend its long overdue value here as part of this chapter. Even my finding of it was an accident of sorts in that I travelled over to UCLA to look at a brochure for a 1939 literary auction benefiting the Spanish loyalists and those Americans fighting with them in which a first draft of an award-winning Maltz short story was auctioned off, and while I was at special collections, I ran across this oral history thanks to a special collections librarian. The text’s value has not been utilized since it seems to have been invisibly stuck in the archives in its own performance of endangered theatre. Gardner minimizes his own role in candidly noting, “In the interviewer’s perspective, the interviewee dictated his life story in the presence of an oral historian” (Gardner xv), suggesting the extent to which Maltz spearheaded each session with a focused passion for telling his story and that of his times, even if, much like recognition of Maltz himself, it was to be valued so belatedly. In its five-year lifespan, the Theatre Union produced eight plays, the majority of which dealt with strikes and all of which foregrounded workers (or working class people) collectively uniting to fight against economic, workplace, and social 187 injustice. 38 In Maltz’s oral history, he quotes the Theatre Union’s mission statement: “We produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-growing social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people. Our plays speak directly to this majority whose lives usually are caricatured or ignored on stage. We do not expect that these plays will fall into accepted social patterns. This is a new kind of professional theater based on the interests and hopes of the great mass of working people” (Retrospect 238). Focusing on the working class and the problems endemic to them provided a discrimination point in deciding what plays the Union would produce as well as a conscious point of differentiation between the Theatre Union and other leftist theatre companies. While Maltz specifically notes the group’s desire to mitigate caricatured dramatic representations of workers, all of the Theatre Union’s productions included representations of workers with very heavy accents. This contributed to stereotypes about workers as uneducated and made it easier for audiences to pity them or see such conditions as naturalized as opposed to empathizing with the characters or being spurred to actively work for change. 38 In Maltz’s oral history, he notes the Theatre Union was responsible for seven productions over their five-year lifespan (Retrospect 391). He does not include Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring in his calculation because the play migrated from Broadway where it was slated to close after 29 performances to the Theatre Union’s off-Broadway venue. Maltz notes that Bein’s play, which is about Appalachian hillbillies economically driven out of the hills to the textile mills and who ultimately unite to strike was more fitting for the Theatre Union’s demographics than those of Broadway, suggesting the ways even Broadway audiences of the 1930’s remained resistant to portrayals of working class life. I am including Bein’s play as a Theatre Union production because it was recast and enjoyed a 79- performance run at the Theatre Union, which makes it their sixth of eight productions. In her book Staging Strikes, Colette Hyman also lists the total number of Theatre Union productions as eight (45). The production frequency metrics of the Theatre Union are approximately in line with other theatres of the time as the Group Theatre did 23 productions in 10 years (W. Smith 411). With a lifespan that doubled that of the Theatre Union, the Group Theatre clearly benefited from economies of scale and time as they honed their methods and methodologies. 188 In Maltz’s oral history, he cites some of the Theatre Union’s unsung contributions to the theatre world, many of which are now so engrained and naturalized as to seem without origin. For instance, the Theatre Union was the first desegregated theatre, a policy they instituted from their first show and which was quickly adopted by other leftist theatres, such as the Group Theatre (Maltz Retrospect 239). Such immediate mimicry suggests the smallness of New York workers’ theatre circles, especially since other theatres were not widely desegregated until World War II. While Maltz doesn’t explain the rationale behind this radical break with accepted policy, many of the Theatre Union’s executive and advisory boards members, including Maltz, were members of the Communist Party. The Party was known for its fiercely insistent fight not just for desegregation but for the dissolution of racial inequality and beyond that, equal rights for blacks and whites, positioning the American Communist Party as a valid precursor to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. The Communist Party even nominated African-American James Ford as vice presidential running mate for presidential candidate William Z. Foster in their 1932 campaign race for executive office (Klehr 80), suggesting the depth of the Party’s commitment to racial equality, an act a major political party would not follow for over 75 years. With its desegregation policy, the Theatre Union actively defined itself as defying the status quo of not just the theatre world but the outside world. Maltz remembers being in New York with African-American writer Richard Wright and wondering if they could find a place to eat lunch that would serve a black and white man at the same table (Retrospect 392-93). Desegregation went beyond the seats as 189 the Theatre Union’s second production, Stevedore, was about labor unrest among African-American dockworkers in New Orleans. The Theatre Union actively sought to cast African-American actors who would be familiar to black audiences and also magnified and formalized its anti-discriminatory policy by “announcing that it would give equal treatment to blacks and whites at the box office” and the box office attendant was instructed to give blacks the best seats available (Hyman 56). The Theatre Union politicized seating and its fiery willingness to engage with controversy and break down barriers offered a way to not just portray social justice on the stage but actively advocate for it in a way that undoubtedly rattled some patrons who did not anticipate their neighbor’s seat being occupied by an African-American. This revolutionary move led to other theatre companies following suit, positioning both leftist theatre and the Communist Party as decidedly ahead of their day on the social justice front. Given that Stevedore ran for 175 total performances (Maltz Retrospect 276-77) and was the Theatre Union’s most financially and theatrically successful production, its forward, unapologetic desegregation of the stage and seats were clearly not audience deterrents. Desegregation wasn’t the Theatre Union’s only kick-off contribution. Margaret Larkin 39 was responsible for the Theatre Union’s publicity, which suited her prior experience as a trade union publicist and labor journalist, and Larkin originated the idea of including brief actor biographies and previous production credits on programs (Maltz Retrospect 253, 233). This is now an unquestioned and requisite 39 As a sidebar, Larkin and Albert Maltz met through their mutual involvement in the Theatre Union; the two ultimately married in 1937, had two children, and subsequently divorced in 1964. 190 inclusion element on all theatre programs, even for the simplest, most elementary productions. Unlike many of the executive board members whose organizing experience lay in politics, Larkin had actual involvement with labor, and her background in publicity geared her towards creative outreach, and the program innovation was consistent with the Theatre Union’s push for contextual relevance. Their raw dramatic materials came out of the events and problems of the time, and highlighting their actors’ involvement in other socially aware theatre offered another layer of context, especially given that many cast members performed in multiple Theatre Union productions. Other Theatre Union innovations remained localized within the company but reflected the group’s devotion to the representation of social problems and the working class as not just puff-piece advertising rhetoric but a foundational basis of their own policies and procedures, which actively sought equality as they tried to mirror the ethics they touted. The Theatre Union didn’t want to just consistently represent working class issues, they also wanted the same audiences to fill their theatre and rented the Civic Repertory Theatre on 14 th Street and 6 th Avenue in lower Manhattan (Maltz Retrospect 242). One way they targeted audiences was by slashing ticket prices from the typical $3.30 for a Broadway show at the time to a top seat price of $1.50, going down from there to 35 cents, then free tickets for unemployed groups, which were supported by requests for audience donations during each performance (Retrospect 240). This same price-cutting strategy had been adopted by a more experimental, leftist Theatre Union predecessor, the New Playwrights Theatre, but they still were not able to garner working class attendees. The Theatre Union did 191 achieve success, which is directly attributable to the presence of experienced organizers on the Theatre Union’s executive board who proved useful in devising creative outreach that advertised low-cost tickets to intended target audiences, such as labor unions. The failure of the New Playwrights Theatre in attracting working class audiences demonstrates that pricing adjustments alone are not a sufficient draw but need to be accompanied by promotion so the desired audiences are made aware of both the productions and the discounted savings. The necessarily unabashed willingness of professional organizers to promote their cause resulted in Theatre Union members actively attending union meetings to seek support from the groups they wanted to reach and earn as audiences. These advertising efforts were aided by the fact the Theatre Union also finetuned the existing practice of selling batches of tickets to organizations at a discount, which the organization could then resell to members for full price as a fundraising effort (Maltz Retrospect 240). The practice of advanced ticket sales helped the Theatre Union raise funds for its next production and also guarantee a certain run for the current production. Thanks to persistent, sustained outreach efforts, audience members from labor unions and political organizations responded as attendees. The diversity of the Theatre Union’s audiences was truly laudable as they also managed to attract groups as disparate as New York’s Dentists’ Wives Society, local fraternities, labor groups, and churches (Hyman 51). The diversity of the executive board was mirrored in the diversity of the audiences they attracted. The attraction of diverse groups was not without conscious or considerable effort and also did not go as unrecognized by theatre commentators of the time, one of whom noted: 192 “The success of its audience organization is perhaps the most important achievement of the theatre, since it establishes that a social theatre can exist financially” (qtd. in Hyman 51-52). While the Theatre Union wasn’t ultimately financially sustainable, its methodology proved that theatre could broaden its audience reach. In addition to attracting a wide variety of attendees, the Theatre Union also reached them – or they reached the Theatre Union – in record numbers. 250,000 of New York’s 4 to 5 million workers attended a Theatre Union production in its first year 40 (England 6), during which time the Theatre Union only produced two plays, Albert Maltz and George Sklar’s anti-war play Peace on Earth and George Sklar and Paul Peters’ Stevedore about African-American dockworkers. Maltz notes he and George Sklar felt defeated and depressed after the initial reviews of Peace on Earth. The New York Times’ legendary theatre critic Brooks Atkinson panned the theatre’s opening production saying, “As propaganda against war, Peace on Earth is pathetically inadequate. Being conceived in a mood of adolescent hysteria, it is as maudlin as the mob it denounces” (qtd. in Maltz Retrospect 244). Maltz notes the Theatre Union was able to attract critics like Brooks Atkinson since the theatre they rented, the Civic Repertory, had previously been run by famed actress and director, Eva Le Galliene; her successful repertory theatre had been housed there, so the Civic Rep was a location theatergoers were already conditioned to attending (Retrospect 242). Consequently, the Theatre Union did not have to “train” theatergoers to include a new theatre venue in their circuit, just the working class audiences they wanted to 40 In his oral history, Maltz notes the Theatre Union reached 300,000 audience members in its first year (Retrospect 277). I am using the more conservative estimate of 250,000 since that statistic was provided in 1936, which is closer in time to the first year and is therefore probably more accurate. 193 attract, and the quality of Galliene’s work created site-specific momentum the Theatre Union benefited from. Theatre reviews of Peace on Earth weren’t as universally negative as Atkinson’s. Joseph Freeman in the Daily Worker focused more on the crowd and the audience response, “The Theatre Union’s production opened Wednesday night before a mixed audience of evening clothes and flannel shirts, who were swept by the play’s power into prolonged applause. The house was filled not merely with the intellectual response evoked by good propaganda, but with the emotional tension aroused by good art” (qtd. in Maltz Retrospect 245). Freeman specifically notes the intermingled demographics of gowns and flannel, and his inclusion of this comment suggests the noteworthy rarity of such a thoroughly blended audience. His comment also creates another level of desegregation credit for the Theatre Union, this time for class. Freeman’s comment also makes it clear that the Theatre Union’s efforts to target the working class and earn them as audience members was not a last-ditch wooing effort to save a failing theatre or an ailing production but was an integral part of the company’s ideology from the outset that pre-existed the opening night of their first production. Interestingly, both Atkinson and Freeman use the word propaganda; Atkinson sees the play as overtly manipulative whereas Freeman responds to the play as the happy combination of propaganda and art, another high and low that mirrors the bespeckled blending of flannel and finery among the crowd. Maltz notes he and George Sklar dreaded the executive board meeting after the play’s opening since the reviews were going to determine a negative outcome, which would translate to a short run and consequently a financial loss for the theatre 194 (Retrospect 245). While Maltz neither states nor implies this, his shared feeling of dread with Sklar was probably not just that their play was not critically embraced and faced failure but that they had disappointed the Theatre Union as a community of committed professionals with a shared dream with this first production. Maltz noting his sense of extreme dejection points to a clear hierarchy in theatre criticism, which is to say that Brooks Atkinson and The New York Times are determiners of theatrical fate that overshadow the positive words of Joseph Freeman in the Daily Worker. If the two critics’ words had been reversed, the play’s run would have been secure, leaving far too much power to the prominent theatre critic who may not be able to save a production but could certainly kill one. Maltz and Sklar were subsequently shocked at the board meeting when those who were organizers and conditioned to a fighting mentality immediately devised a communications and marketing plan to promote and save the production of Peace on Earth (Maltz Retrospect 246). Maltz notes this was a new and novel experience for both him and Sklar as theatre professionals who were conditioned to accepting reviews as deciders of theatrical fate. The outreach campaign succeeded fairly well, and Peace on Earth, while never a moneymaker, ended up running 26 weeks at the Civic Repertory with a subsequent 4-6 week run at a Broadway venue sponsored by another group (Retrospect 248). Interestingly, as the show continued on and thrived, some of the early reviewers returned and ended up reviewing the play again more favorably, showing the effects of commercial appeal on the critical mind, but more importantly, the effects of the working class, Freeman’s noted flannel shirts. This audience bent critical interpretation by validating the play’s worth through 195 attendance, a shift that perhaps anticipated the power and success of the working class in mass during labor strikes. Stevedore triumphed as the Theatre Union’s most successful and profitable production, running for 111 performances with full houses at each show, then reopening for an additional 64 performances (Retrospect 253, 276). Clearly, advertising a desegregated theatre did not result in an attendance dip, proving that well-done theatre with controversial material and social relevance, that combination of good propaganda and good art that Freeman pinpointed, could successfully garner an audience. Even with such shockingly high attendance rates of a quarter of a million in one year, a social theatre wasn’t ultimately financially feasible, at least for the Theatre Union, since it fell victim to bankruptcy. This, however, is not to say their efforts were without impact. The fact they could attract large crowds of working class people who saw current social issues portrayed and addressed on stage while sitting in a desegregated and diverse audience provided the opportunity to center working class issues and reach new audiences. In his oral history, Maltz recalls hearing one patron walk out of the theatre saying, “That was a great picture show I saw,” which Maltz notes was not an uncommon response (Retrospect 247-48). This illustrates that some portion of their audience had never been to a play before and related it to the closest experience they had, which was attending a movie and ultimately did not distinguish between the two, at least in nomenclature, blurring the lines between cinema and drama. Another group of workers, which Maltz summarizes as “naivete,” staked out the stage door after a show to beat up one of the villains (Retrospect 248). While they clearly weren’t regular theatregoers, this action in fact demonstrates the 196 live action nature of theatre has the power to affect people more deeply than celluloid experiences. Theatre is a more dangerous space than film in that its immediacy creates immediacy in audience experiences and reactions, pulling the “danger” out of endangered theatre. After all, it was the potential for danger that caused organizations like the Reading, Pennsylvania school board to ban the Brookwood Labor Players from performing their Chautauqua at the school’s auditorium. Maltz’s use of the term naïve shows his separation from and a certain inherent elitism, intentional or not, towards the working class as one steeped in professional theatre and as a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. The threatened donnybrook with the actor playing the villain was in fact consistent with the dissolution of the boundaries between art and life that sometimes happened during worker-generated productions. When Strike Marches On was performed as part of the GM strike victory celebrations, no one wanted to play the stool pigeon since stools had caused such strife during the strike and had been responded to with harsh and unforgiving uncertainty, thereby deterring future side- changing and ship-jumping. Consequently, no one wanted to take on the role of the stool and create potential confusion about his loyalty. Director Morris Watson notes he had to “use powers of persuasiveness to convince a prospective stool pigeon that the representation of such a low creature was in this particular instance an important, a very important strike duty” (5). Watson’s task was particularly difficult because in the context of Strike Marches On, actors were largely portraying their own jobs, so no doubt a striker playing a fictional role of stool would fear a potential for confusion 197 when in the assembly-line scenes, the men who worked at them were pantomiming their own jobs. In terms of other in-house innovations, members of the Theatre Union’s executive board were unpaid (Maltz Retrospect 239). Even more astonishingly, particularly by today’s standards, the Theatre Union paid the same $40 per week salary to all theatre professionals. Forty dollars was chosen because it was the lowest weekly salary Actors Equity would allow professional actors to work for (Retrospect 239). This forty-dollar figure ended up being an unequivocal salary distributed to not just actors but directors and all company staff, including the theatre’s executive director, publicity person, and even the dedicated janitor/night watchman (Retrospect 239). Famous actors who appeared in specific productions were not exempt and received the same forty-dollar weekly compensation (Retrospect 239). While no doubt an economically driven decision given the company’s tight purse strings and chronic financial crisis, such a decision was also consistent with the group’s largely Communist make-up. By today’s standards where gross economic inequality reigns in everything from the film industry to professional athletics, such a concept is nearly incomprehensible and would quickly be slapped with a Communist label and outcry that different training rates demand commensurate salaries. While an flat organizational rate may be extreme, the appeal of minimizing the percentage discrepancies between the highest and lowest salaries in an organization may have increased appeal at present with budget cut threats and skyrocketing pink slip handouts as the economic recession of the late aughts ever more mirrors the 1930’s. 198 Workers’ Theatre: Professional Versus Worker-Generated In addressing and portraying working class issues in dramatic form to a target market of working class audiences, the Theatre Union was similar to worker- generated dramatic content, be it Brookwood’s Labor Chautauqua program or plays written in association with unions or sit-downs like Flint’s GM strike or Detroit’s Woolworth’s strike. This section of the chapter will highlight the significant differences between these two types of theatres that shared a superficial similarity in goals. They both wanted to attract working class audiences and consequently worked to create relevant content by focusing on portrayals and dramatic explorations of contemporary social issues that were relevant to workers. With Brookwood’s annual Chautauqua often travelling to the same groups year after year, the labor college was particularly sensitive to the value of currency, and their annual program adaptations pointedly attempted to adjust to the latest news in modifying their new play line-up each season. Since the Theatre Union averaged 1.6 shows per year during its five- year lifespan, its page to stage lifecycle was significantly longer than Brookwood, and its plays were focused on social and economic injustices without drawing on often specifically recognizable current events in the more living newspaper style of the worker-generated drama. Both Brookwood and the Theatre Union looked to entertain, but Brookwood largely saw entertainment as a conduit to education. Brookwood director’s Tucker P. Smith’s speech for the March 1936 Workers’ Theatre Conference entitled “Plays as Teaching Devices” forefronted the school’s position that drama was a tool for education. As Smith elaborates in his speech, theatre offers the most entertaining and 199 profitable form of education that also allows for the most controversy since people’s tolerance for new ideas in theatre-form exceeds what they would bear in lecture form (T. Smith 3). Edith Berkowitz Parker, a participant in Brookwood’s 1935 Chautauqua season, remembers, “Wherever we went, [audiences] adored us. All the plays were oriented toward the kind of lives they led. And we could do it well because we weren’t removed from it” (qtd. in Hyman 56). Professional workers’ theatre, regardless of its level of research, was alienated from source material in a way that actual workers were not. This resulted in a disconnection and loss in authenticity, despite good intentions and a genuine sensitivity to and sympathy for workers and their problems. Chapters two and three focused, with varying degrees of depth, on six different plays – three from Brookwood and three that were union-based. The Brookwood plays were 1935’s Model 7A and Shop Strife as well as the 1937 seasonal centerpiece, Sit-Down!. The union plays were Strike Marches On (1937), which was written during the Flint sit-down. Million Dollar Babies Sit Down (1937) was written by the Woolworth’s Entertainment Committee during their Detroit sit-down while the ILGWU’s Sit Down Sister! (1937) is another union product. The Theatre Union produced eight plays during its five-year lifespan, in addition to renting out its space to other theatre companies to generate revenue and help defray ongoing operational costs and expenses. Five of those eight plays are included in this chapter, and the three to be excluded were translations and adaptations of European works. These five plays include Albert Maltz and George Sklar’s Peace on Earth (1933) an anti-war play about a professor’s ultimately fatal involvement in a strike; George Sklar and 200 Paul Peters’ Stevedore (1934) about African-American dockworkers in New Orleans; Albert Maltz’s Black Pit (1935) about West Virginia coal miners; Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring (1935) about Appalachian textile workers; and John Howard Lawson’s Marching Song (1937) about an auto strike. The five plays cross industries, becoming progressively more assembly line and industrially oriented. All of them showcase unsatisfactorily answered, ultimately explosive tensions between workers and those that employ (or control) them, and each play involves, to some degree, a labor strike. The Theatre Union’s core mission was to “produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-growing social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people. Our plays speak directly to this majority” (Maltz Retrospect 238). The Theatre Union diverged from Brookwood’s educational mission in their claim about forefronting boldness and having relevancy to an underrepresented majority, a population they had to attract to their theatre as opposed to Brookwood’s roadshow Chautauqua format that took the theatre to the working class. While the Theatre Union’s plays always forefronted social problems, their claim of boldness never extended to the dramatic resolution of problems with the exactness that Brookwood did in their plays. The Theatre Union’s plays were bold in taking workers to the brink of social problems. However, their plays typically left audiences hanging right after a moment of crisis and failed to provide working class audiences with proposed solutions. Integrating follow-through could have benefited working class audiences who likely recognized their problems but were more in need of possible solutions and execution strategies. 201 The professional impulse to dramatize and add excitement, largely through conflict, contrasted with a more general impulse for optimism in worker-generated dramatic content. In looking at these two representative sets of plays, a differing relationship to violence emerges that most prominently distinguishes them. All five professionally authored plays include not just one, but multiple, violent deaths in the course of the action, whereas none of the worker-generated plays discussed include even one death. All of these deaths in professional drama take their victims from the already undersupported worker side. In no case is anyone from the opposition killed, such as a company boss, stooge, thug, stool or spy, even though corporate interests consistently seem more “deserving” of such treatment due to the oppressions they’ve imposed. Unjust corporate hierarchical superiority derived from power and money give companies privileged access to skew media reporting and control the local law enforcement. This subsequently allows them to remain unpunished for the murder of workers or illegal acts, even though the most minor infraction – or even a manufactured one – can result in punishment for the laboring side. Maltz notes that when he was in Pennsylvania, the state police were referred to as the “coal and iron police” because they were in the pockets of coal mine and steel mill owners, making them nothing more than payrolled company thugs (Maltz Retrospect 257). Similarly in Flint, General Motors controlled local media in the form of the Flint Journal as well as law enforcement, and it was only Michigan governor Frank Murphy’s commitment to staving off violence that resulted in the National Guard being called in to quell violence and maintain order, not contribute to GM’s campaign against the strikers. In an article Maltz wrote that was published in the March 1937 202 issue of New Theatre & Film, he talks about being in Flint during the sit-down strike. Maltz writes, “On Monday night I saw a policeman in shell vest and gas mask take careful aim and fire a gas shell through a restaurant window where wounded strikers were waiting for ambulances; and the next day I read in the Flint Journal that an unidentified civilian threw an unexploded gas bomb into a restaurant” (Brimmerton 13). Maltz literally witnessed first-hand the transformation of newspapers into fiction written by corporations to incite fear and turn popular opinion and local citizens against the strikers, relying on readers to trust as true the writings in the genre of the supposedly factual newspaper. Maltz was in Flint and the surrounding area researching what would become his first novel, The Underground Stream, published in 1940, so his presence in Michigan overlapped somewhat circumstantially with the sit-down. While not about the sit-down specifically, Maltz’s novel is about organizing labor. It tells the story of Princey, a Communist autoworker who is trying to organize the Jefferson Motors auto plant where he works, is kidnapped by company stooges, and ultimately killed when he won’t agree to work as a company spy and report on union activity, despite the seductive promise of significant salary increases. The Jefferson executive, Grebb, who lays out the terms: spy for money or be killed falsely assumes the latter needs no more than a passing mention to show Princey the actual lack of choice. Grebb falsely assumes sufficient sums of money buy anything and that it’s just a matter of finding the right pricetag. He automatically assumes his financial motivators are shared and can be leveraged, not bargaining on the interrupting force of ethics. 203 Princey’s struggles, and ultimate decision not to rat out his fellow workers, despite the dire personal consequences of sacrificing his life, foreshadowed Maltz’s own ethical dilemmas before HUAC and his decision not to name names, despite federal imprisonment and decades of the blacklist. While a summary makes the novel sound almost like theatrical melodrama, the novel traces Princey’s thoughts and musings as he weighs and debates his post-abduction options, a process that remains interesting in its details because he never just toes the Communist Party line but earnestly struggles with vacillation and weakness. The novel cuts between this largely internal debate and a frantic, ultimately futile, manhunt by Princey’s wife and Party friends to locate him. In the article, Maltz uses his experiences in Flint to draw a parallel between events there and the fictionalized town of Brimmerton where John Howard Lawson’s auto strike play Marching Song takes place, which had just opened to poor reviews at the Theatre Union prior to the publication of Maltz’s article. In speaking about Flint and the artistic process, Maltz notes, “A town of a hundred and sixty-five thousand in which a strike is being fought is not a flowing stream with a middle, beginning and end, with a forty-five-minute first act and a dramatic curtain to the second. It is a boiling sea with a thousand eddies and a thousand streaks of color, with a thrust and swirl of current and cross current. It is people and social forces churning each other at a frenzied, confusing pace. To bring real clarity to that is an artist’s task” (Brimmerton 13). While Maltz emphasizes that Lawson has capably risen to the challenge with Marching Song, Maltz also basically says the complexity and chaos of the strike’s events are not inherently containable by or conducive to the constraints of conventional drama. Given Maltz’s first novel was inspired by his 204 experiences in Flint, he clearly felt the scope of theatre couldn’t capture the simultaneous frenzy and nuance of the strike and needed the broader expanses of fiction to turn the “boiling sea” into the underground stream that gives Maltz’s novel its title. Theatrically (and in Maltz’s novel), the deaths and casualties on the side of labor are typically the result of paid company stooges or thugs. While real-life strikers certainly suffered at the hands of company police, Theatre Union productions translated such outcomes into inevitabilities. In no case is any punishment doled out or even charges pressed against the responsible company or its representative minions. Money and power are protective layers, ones the working class lacks, so a worker sacrificing his life for a cause knows the crime will definitively remain unpunished and may well be a meaningless sacrifice if the larger effort fails. In Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring, union and strike organizer Kirk McClure explains to the textile strikers that they must be unarmed on the picket lines. For the worker population he’s addressing, such a demand nearly counters instinct; the textile workers are almost uniformly byproducts of the Appalachians where carrying a rifle is a natural part of daily life, be it to fend off bears or kill your next meal. When the strikers express surprise and disgruntlement over not being allowed to bring weapons to the picket line, Kirk both cautions and motivates them: “We must go unarmed – at the present – an’ I know from experience if we fight with numbers they cain’t drive us back – we must overcome with numbers an’ with spirit an’ with determination! An’ we kin do hit cause we outnumber them thousands t’ thar one!” (Bein 155-56). 205 While the strikers certainly outnumber their opponents, the combination of numbers, spirit and determination are hardly foolproof defenses in an unequal battle that has them facing off against gunned officers. Kirk’s argument is repeated in varying forms across the Theatre Union’s plays, reinforcing the lesson that workers must be ready to sacrifice their lives in order to achieve a greater good. While grand in statement, such sweeping statements fail to take into account the fates of widows and children left behind by such martyrdom. The dramatic repetition of unpunished death that subsequently diminished the chances for strike success hardly provided an inspiring motive for any working class attendee and may in fact have deterred union or strike participation. The Theatre Union’s desire for boldness was mostly typically expressed in the dramatic death of a central figure. This in fact created a bleak vision for labor that made defeat seem more probable than success, which may have unintentionally alienated working class audiences. On-stage representations of workers wanting to organize, and those leading them, faced the ultimate and somewhat romantic sacrifice of life for a larger cause. While the perpetrator is never charged, tried or punished for his crime, the implication is that winning the larger cause will be a more unspecific, but ultimately crueler, form of punishment because it will be a wider victory for all workers. The death of an integral figure, most often the strike leader or intended strike leader, typically serves one of two purposes: 1.) a conversion tool that makes supporters out of previous doubters or those who were naively trying to remain neutral or uninvolved or 2.) a catalyst that triggers and inspires collective worker action. This collectivism typically comes in the form of binding disparate (or 206 distrusting) groups, which then becomes a precursor to a strike or a retribution-driven stimulus to carry on a nascent strike to victory and thereby lend value to the loss of the dead worker. Winning the strike for the greater good doubles as a posthumous validation of the sacrificial lamb and simultaneously inculcates one into martyrdom, which serves moral justice as opposed to the legal justice of trying the responsible party for the death. With the killing of key strike contributors across plays, the Theatre Union’s works ultimately suggest that a corporate police state will be maintained, key players on the side of righteousness will be killed, and communal sacrifice may very well be for naught. The intra- and cross-production repetition of death as part of the strike process contributed to negative public perceptions of strikes as inherently violent. Let Freedom Ring ends with Kirk McClure’s death; he is killed saving a black striker from being lynched by freshly deputized strikebreakers, and the play closes with Kirk’s funeral and a eulogy for him delivered by his brother, John. Representatives from neighboring textile towns also on strike come to the funeral to lament Kirk’s loss as a leader. For those in Leesville, who have just begun their strike against Wentworth Textile Mills, the hope for positive resolution seems dim. John vows to take over leadership of the strike efforts and has credibility as a mountain native and McClure family member, and he is also respected as a worker who rose through the Wentworth ranks to manager and subsequently joined the strikers, unable to profiteer at the expense of his fellow workers. However, as impassioned as John may be, the reality is that he lacks his brother’s strike-strategizing experience. In the span of a few weeks in Leesville before his death, Kirk organized the workers; helped define strike 207 demands that were consistent with other textile mills; guided strategy, such as remaining unarmed on the picket lines; and weakened racist prejudices as he convinced the skeptical white majority to embrace African-American workers as part of the union. Kirk illustrated that black workers would be hired as scabs, thereby appealing to the greater preservation of the cause as opposed to any extension of goodwill. However, Kirk himself is killed saving a black striker from being lynched, suggesting his personal resolve for racial equality is sincere and deeper than the superficial reasoning he was compelled to use to persuade the strikers. John doesn’t and wouldn’t have had the knowledge or experience necessary to enact any of these strategies, and given Kirk is the sole regional organizer, success for the textile workers seems inevitably hopeless if one projects forward a few weeks. At Kirk’s funeral, John preaches, “Kirk kem an’ give his life t’ sweep us out in t’ the world o’ workers that are everywhar on the march now a-strugglin’ like ourselves for freedom…an’ jest cause he gave his life fer sech a cause we’re never a- goin’ t’ fergit nor fergive those that took hit” (Bein 169). When John ends his speech, he’s described as “overwhelmed with emotion” (169-70). Interestingly, there’s no noted reaction from the packed union hall, which has been described throughout the scene as murmuring. The collective response of silence is tepid at best considering the rallying commitment John so vitally urges. John wants to continue fighting for justice both for the workers’ sake and to give meaning to Kirk’s life and prevent his death from being futilely empty. Instead of galvanizing the strikers, their leader’s death instead tempers a fueled people whose quietness bespeaks a level of fear and a collectively unspoken realization, perhaps in deference to John, that their cause is 208 now lost. John’s argument that the fight must continue because of Kirk’s death is a weak claim as the impact of Kirk’s death will undoubtedly fade over the upcoming weeks as it’s ever more distant and all but forgotten outside of the immediate McClure family. John’s inability to even rally the troops to shout out in support of the strike at this emotionally charged pinnacle suggests his leadership is weak, although through no fault of his own. After John’s speech, the only comment comes from his mother, Ora, who says, “I was so afeard at first that everything mought be ended,” to which John replies and ends the play by affirming, “No, Mom, hit’s only jest begun” (170), a comment that may in fact reflect his individual hope more than any shared collective conscious. A strike is never seen through to its conclusion, let alone victory, in any of the Theatre Union productions, whereas three of the six worker-generated plays track their strikes through to success. In the Theatre Union’s plays, the narrative and action most commonly discontinue at the moment of strike inception or in parallel with a rousing speech voicing hope and campaigning for the urgency of sticking together and fighting on towards victory. Both situations are typically triggered by the death of a key figure, such as Kirk McClure’s funeral that ends Let Freedom Ring. John Howard Lawson’s Marching Song, which opened on February 17, 1937, was the Theatre Union’s last production before its descent into bankruptcy, a fall that was accelerated by the Theatre Union’s forced relocation from the Civic Repertory Theatre, which was slated to be leveled for a parking lot, to the Nora Bayes Theater at considerable expense in both moving and setting up the new theatre (Maltz Retrospect 390). While Lawson wrote his play about an auto strike in the summer of 209 1936, the opening of Marching Song serendipitously came only six days after the UAW victory against GM and the plant evacuation in Flint. The nation was still riveted to news of and reeling from the UAW coup, and sit-down fever was rippling out from its roots in Michigan and starting to sweep the nation. Strike Marches On was created during the final days of the Flint strike and was optimistic with its implication of inevitable victory through unity. Its sole performance as part of the victory celebrations gave it a site-generated affirmative ending of victory and unity as the voices in Flint call out and are answered affirmatively by workers across the country and the world. Titus’ Sit-Down! was penned as the strike unfolded and ends with victory and the singing of “Solidarity,” a song found in nearly every worker-generated play. In fact, Brookwood’s 1935 Shop Strife, the third of the six worker-generated plays to end with success, closes exactly the same as Sit-Down!, with the successful recognition of the union and the singing of “Solidarity,” the words of which are never listed in any worker-generated text. The song is presumed knowledge given these worker-generated plays reflected the song’s frequent use by labor organizations and as part of actual strikes. None of the professional Theatre Union plays even include the singing of “Solidarity,” suggesting one more way in which professional playwrights were distanced from the audiences they wanted to both portray and attract. Unlike Strike Marches On and Sit-Down!, Lawson’s auto drama ends with a hope that’s not large enough to promise victory. Maltz notes Marching Song opened to terrible reviews and only ran for seven weeks before it and the Theatre Union both closed (Retrospect 390). Unlike Peace on Earth, the Theatre Union was not able to perform a save for 210 Lawson’s production, suggesting Lawson’s auto strike position, which was considerably darker in tone and content than the worker-generated versions, was grossly out of sync with a nationally optimistic mood of the moment. Lawson’s Marching Song takes place in an abandoned auto plant, which serves as makeshift home and meeting place, and ends with the death of the key strike leader, Bill Anderson. He’s tortured and burned to death with red-hot crowbars by Brimmer Motor Company stooges, and despite his heroic bravery against excruciating pain, he is not found in time and dies. His body is discovered as the auto strikers take refuge in the abandoned plant to escape being pelted with teargas bombs and scattered machine gun fire. The company police have freshly deputized local townspeople to assist with striker dispersal, and they’re eager to enjoy their newfound, albeit temporary, power with guns and weaponry. Their presence and willingness to engage in violence against unarmed strikers counters Kirk’s assertion in Let Freedom Ring that with enough people, one can overcome a cadre of police. This is to say the desire for self-preservation involuntarily overcomes solidarity of cause in the face of a one-sided gun battle. The sophistication in weaponry and the freedom from observing the law allow the company to assert dominance in a matter of minutes. The strikers who stumble into the abandoned plant for sanctuary are described as having “attitudes of defeat and despair” (Lawson 157). The only glimmering hope for success is when the lights go out thanks to a sympathetic electrical worker at the local power plant who pulls the plug on the town’s power in a show of cross-union solidarity, which gives the strikers a respite in the safety of darkness. Even the enshrined darkness is only temporary cover, and the 211 terrified air of defeat and despair that was created in mere minutes is not likely to improve with the widespread news of Bill’s death as strike leader. Lawson’s dark and violent ending contrasts with the real-life happy ending for the autoworkers in Flint who emerged victorious from the plants and paraded through Flint with no deaths among their ranks after a 44-day strike internment, far longer than any strike portrayed in a Theatre Union production. Not surprisingly given the national working class mood of optimism around change coming out of Flint and the UAW’s crushing defeat of GM, Lawson’s Marching Song disappointing seven week run sealed the Theatre Union’s fate of bankruptcy (Maltz Retrospect 390). In her book Radical Representations, Barbara Foley defines what she sees as the four major components of proletarian literature. Most broadly, proletarian literature has a leftist point of view and traces class struggle and conflict. These four components include audience, authorship, subject matter, and political perspective (Foley 87), and the emphasis on each of these four quadrants shifted over the course of the 1930’s. Audience remained a key criterion because proletarian writers were only effective if they were reaching the working class. The need to be seen and heard by those they addressed and preferably came from was necessary to effect change. This left the Theatre Union with the task of attracting working class audiences to the venue of a conventional theatre, which they accomplished due to those on their executive board with organizing experience by outreach efforts, aggressive campaigning to labor unions, and offering blocks of discounted tickets. Maltz remembers going out with other executive board members to speak on behalf of the theatre and promote productions. Maltz notes this was a completely new experience 212 for all of the theatre professionals, which they initially met with trepidation, suggesting how even those with working class sympathies still maintained a distance between themselves and their target audience, hearkening back to Maltz’s comment framing Theatre Union attendees as naïve (Retrospect 248). In terms of audience, Brookwood took the theatre to their audiences, and since their shows were often incorporated into union meetings, garnering a working class audience was not a problem. Due to their theatrical distribution methods, Brookwood also never attracted the “carriage trade” of “people who came in taxis or in limousines,” which always represented a portion of the Theatre Union’s audiences (Retrospect 248). This population was certainly not working class but were probably sympathetic to working class causes to some extent given the Theatre Union’s mission. Authorial status as a worker and member of the proletariat was emphasized earlier in the 1930’s since in 1929, author Michael Gold had famously defined a proletarian writer as “a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines, and steel mills, harvest fields and mountain camps of America. He is sensitive and impatient. He writes in jets of exasperated feeling and has no time to polish his work” (382). Gold’s definition was exuberantly inspiring in authoritatively removing barriers around writing as a field reserved for professionals. However, none of the Theatre Union plays were written by Gold’s ideal conjured youth, suggesting that while publication in the pages of Gold’s leftist New Masses magazine was open to these new writers, making the leap into professional acceptance required a higher level of polish than 213 Gold defined and demanded, keeping a proverbial glass ceiling on the rise of this new proletarian writer who would be delimited as worker-generated content. Political perspective as proletarian criterion gained definitional dominance as the decade progressed and proletarian literature gained popularity. Professional writers, many of whom were active in the Communist party, wanted to contribute to an oeuvre they were sympathetic to and believed in, especially given their involvement in social campaigns, such as fighting for the release of the Scottsboro boys. Subject matter and political perspective went somewhat hand in hand in that proletarian content focused on working class issues, so a play about laborers would likely be sympathetic to the workers, not the corporate oppressor. Albert Maltz grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and his father was a builder, but he also attended Columbia and then the Yale School of Drama, where he met future collaborator George Sklar, solidly removing Maltz from Gold’s proletarian descriptor. Maltz describes his travels and encounters with working class people as the direct inspiration for most of his creative works. However, he also remained an outsider in those groups, despite his extensive fraternizing, especially since he had the disposable income to travel, albeit modestly, 10,000 miles around the United States in summer 1934. For example, Maltz spent a week in a coal mining camp in the southwestern Pennsylvania town of Brownsville after he applied for a job as a coal miner, which he wasn’t selected for. However, Maltz’s time in the coal camp served a literary use value and allowed him to capture the voices and stories of coal miners, which he used to write his coal mining play, Black Pit, which became the Theatre Union’s fourth 214 production. Maltz was empathetic to the workers’ hardships and “summed up the portrait of so many of these small coal towns, which were company towns, in the preface that I wrote for the published edition” (Retrospect 261). His two-page preface describes the rhythm of these coal camps and their routinized misery: “At five A.M. and at six, at three P.M. and at nine, the siren screams from the mine—a mad, unending, insane scream, regulating lives, summoning to work, like a huge clamp, opening and closing the day” (Pit v-vi). Like the sirens who sing to Odysseus, the mines do not willingly release those who respond and believe internment there is only temporary. The scream of the mine’s siren provides no cathartic relief, instead representing an inescapable, sensory panopticon and the associated anxiety of potentially never seeing a loved one emerge who descends into the mine. Maltz’s experiences in Brownsville and other mining towns dramatically unified around another figure he met in southwestern Pennsylvania’s mining territory: a former mining organizer named Siders who was imprisoned for union activity, released, and avoided the union when he returned (Maltz Retrospect 260-61). Siders provided the inspiration for the main character in Black Pit, Joe Kovalsky. While Maltz himself was not one of Gold’s “wild youths,” Joe Kovalsky as a coal miner with a heavy accent and “about twenty-three, big and muscular with a Slavic cast to his face” (Maltz Pit 3) accurately represented the raw brute strength and force that Gold described. While Joe returns from prison a hero, he’s blacklisted and consequently promises to feed information to the company about union activity in exchange for job security and ten dollars, a small fortune to a poor miner like Joe, 215 whose guilt over the money causes him to buy a keg of beer for a miner’s picnic, the known cost of which first arouses suspicion against him. While Joe privately resolves not to keep this promise, threats of job loss, exposure, and the impending birth of his son cause him both to stool and do the company’s bidding by convincing the miners that a gas-filled mine is in fact safe. The mine subsequently explodes, killing dozens of miners. When his brother-in-law, Tony (played by Martin Wolfson, who also played union organizer Bill Anderson in Marching Song) confronts him, Joe initially justifies his actions. He defends having paid his dues to the union and his subsequent disillusionment: “I go prison for union. Now I wan’ have some lil’ bit good t’ings—wan’ have house…” (Pit 103). Joe’s motivating desire for a little piece of happiness and a slice of the American dream for himself, his wife, and their newborn son cause him to sell out his fellow miners. Once Tony unveils him as a stool and Joe moves from self-defensiveness to sorrow, Tony orders Joe to leave town immediately. Joe knows he won’t be able to care for a family and his own self-worth is so low that he instructs his wife, Iola, to stay behind with the baby, not giving her a chance to participate in deciding her own fate, much like the miners he sent to their death via explosion. Iola’s future and that of his son is now in the care of the larger community. Tony’s act, while harsh, also undoubtedly saves Joe’s life since he would likely face harsher retributions from the larger miner community once they learn of his betrayal that resulted in the mine explosion as he encouraged trusting miners to enter a deathtrap. The review of Black Pit in The New York Times unfavorably compares the play with its three Theatre Union predecessors. The accuracy of the play’s mining 216 town representation is unquestioned, but critic Brooks Atkinson criticizes the production because “Maltz’s literal writing of broken-English dialogue is an impediment in dramatic speech” (Atkinson 26). Atkinson assumes the accent is accurate and in fact deems it literal, suggesting his own class bias and willingness to believe such severely broken English must surely correlate to authenticity. However, Atkinson also finds the severe accents a barrier to understanding. To return to an earlier excerpt, the Theatre Union’s mission statement explicitly stated: “Our plays speak directly to this majority whose lives usually are caricatured or ignored on stage” (Maltz Retrospect 238). Characters with a heavy accent proved to be a common cross-production element in all of the Theatre Union’s plays, and the repetition of accent actively opposed the company’s mission to avoid reducing workers to caricatures. The repeated use of heavy accents by working class characters reinforced stereotypes about the working class as uneducated and had the effect (intended or not) of making these characters, and by extension, working class laborers, appear gullible, unintelligent, and unsophisticated. The Theatre Union also heightened such stereotypical caricatures by having characters outside of the working class speak sans accent. The main character in Peace on Earth is a psychology professor, Pete Owens, who definitively speaks sans accent, lending him an air of refinement, logic, and intelligence and suggesting he rightfully occupies the role of academician. In the play, Pete is asked to use his German to explain the strike to the scabbing German dockworkers who speak little English in order to earn their conversion as strikers. Pete is initially resistant, wanting to stay on the periphery as an observer. He weakens and asks, “What do you want me 217 to say?” and one of the strikers puts it in simple terms saying, “Tell ‘em what the strike’s about” (Sklar and Maltz 47). Pete concedes and uses his education to serve as lynchpin and successfully bridge the striker/scab communication gap, and the strikers cheer him on with cries of “Atta boy, Professor” (47). Pete’s well-spokenness as an academic opposes the more colloquial speech patterns of the strikers who use words like “atta” and “‘em” and call him Professor, a title that acknowledges both his outsider status and intellectual status. The portions of the play in German remain untranslated, leaving audience members who aren’t fluent in the language as confused about specifics as the German workers were in a reverse communication blockade. Even without translation, Pete’s sentences in German are complex, clause heavy, and well-formed, suggesting he is as comfortable speaking German as he is with English. The German scabs band with the strikers, so Pete’s rhetoric proves persuasive, regardless of his exact words. The repeated appearance of heavy accents in professional workers’ theatre is entirely absent from worker-generated plays in which characters speak with unaccented clarity, which explicitly avoids any conflation between being working class and uneducated. The only exception to this is the ILGWU’s Sit Down Sister! in which the Forelady speaks with an accent that bespeaks a lack of education. The rapidity and degree to which she becomes flustered at the clever and well-constructed comments from the audience of female workers she’s addressing overtly calls attention to the ill-equipped nature of those we often have to recognize as superiors. In fact, the Forelady’s lack of education and intellect are necessary for her complacency and willingness to continuously spout unexamined corporate rhetoric. 218 The truth about accents was probably somewhere between the polarized representations of polished worker speech in worker-generated drama and accent as inhibitor in professional workers’ theatre. Atkinson is right in noting the play’s dialect did radically hinder understanding, and the consistent use of dialect to the point of near unintelligibility in professional workers’ theatre did not positively intervene in worker stereotypes, thereby naturalizing unjust treatment of workers. Workers with severe accents are more easily pigeonholed into low wage jobs, and the need to mitigate workplace injustice comes across more authoritatively and urgently when workers speak in equal terms with those who oppress them, making authority seem more arbitrary and reversals of power more credible and necessary. Gold’s definition of the proletarian writer was however controversial, not least of all because it defined proletarian writers by exclusion as male and defiantly masculine in their industry, suggesting the role of proletarian writer was not one that could apprised by a woman, even though many females successfully wrote about proletarian life. None of the eight Theatre Union plays were written, or even coauthored, by a woman, but of the six worker-generated plays discussed, four have female authors. Of those four, all of them were coauthored efforts. Interestingly, the only worker-generated play with single male authorship is Titus’ Sit-Down!, which was instructor, not student generated, making it more closely aligned with professional workers’ theatre, and Titus’ had worked in workers’ theatre, so he straddled the line between the two sides. While female authorship didn’t translate to professional theatre, two of the Theatre Union’s eight productions were coauthored efforts. Barbara Foley notes with 219 some surprise that there were “very few forays into group authorship by the American left” (67), but she clearly doesn’t account for worker-generated drama given that collective authorship dominated in that arena. The collective nature of writing mirrored the cooperation necessary for larger causes, like the production of a play or the combating of social injustice. The predominance of collaborative writing among female workers often extended to the point that the texts would not even be attributed to a group of individuals, listing only the union as the named author, suggesting a shift away from individual recognition and reinforcing the need for sacrifice and collectivism that a successful union and strike necessitated. This differential also highlights the ways in which professional theatre at the time was still closed off to female authorial contributions. The Theatre Union’s Margaret Larkin was in charge of publicity but also served in the dual role of secretary, suggesting even progressive organizations struggled with recognizing women outside of accepted gender roles. While Communism was sensitively attune to terminating racial inequality, the movement as a whole was criticized for a similar lack of progressiveness around women, tending to see and keep them in more traditional roles, a tendency that was mirrored in professional theatre circles. Female characters in male-generated plays are generally more stereotypical whereas gender inequalities are less pronounced in female-generated plays. This varies from Foley’s assertion that “where novels by male radicals frequently establish male heroes at the expense of female political growth, novels by women radicals are more consistently egalitarian” (Foley 239). The presentation of women in Theatre Union texts may have been less revolutionary than in female worker-generated plays, 220 but male heroes did not develop at the expense of women. Millicent Green, who played a militant female striker named Rose in Maltz and Sklar’s Peace On Earth, notes this Theatre Union production was the most thrilling play she was ever involved with (Hyman 51). Green offers no rationale for her comment, but in the play, her character, Rose, literally storms the gangplank, leading the strikers to the German scabs onboard who have joined the strike after learning what they were told was soap is in fact munitions that will be shipped to advance the war and kill those in their home country. Much like the women in Flint who stormed down the hill during the Battle of Bulls’ Run, daring the police to shoot them in the back, Rose too offers herself up as a sacrifice. She dares the company thugs to shoot her like they did her brother during the same strike, shouting “Was he a criminal? No, he was fighting with the workers, fighting for the right to live –” (Sklar and Maltz 50). Rose’s defiance and willingness to risk mortality give her an indefatigable appeal, and her activism is driven by her desire to give meaning and clarity to her brother’s death as well as continue his fight. Despite threats, Rose is not killed boarding the boat, but another strike participant, Mac (who is also a labor journalist) is shot and dies, becoming the play’s second fatality after Rose’s brother. Millicent Green went on to play Florrie Reynolds in the second Theatre Union production, Stevedore, and in that play, her character seeks retribution and exercises power in one of the limited ways she knows how as a middle-class white woman, by reporting being attacked by a black man. As only the audience knows, she had an affair with a black dockworker named Bill Larkin, and his rebuffing of her continued advances after the affair motivates her claim of attack, an accusation which the police 221 escalate to a charge of rape. Florrie regrets her false and desperate accusation, especially given her actions don’t win her lover back; consequently, she claims not to be able to identify the perpetrator, but she’s unwilling to retract her charge, even as the police are targeting and arresting all local black men for questioning and demanding alibis for the night of the alleged rape. The knowledge that her image would be transformed from object of pity to ruined adulteress as a result an interracial love affair and perjury is enough to keep her from retracting her statement. Her pleas for the police to discontinue the investigation are limited to an extension of feminine wiles; she dissolves into tears after being asked to identify countless suspects and cries out, “You’ve had me down here four days in a row. What more do you want? I’m tired of it. Why don’t you leave me alone? Leave me alone!” (Peters and Sklar 21). She collapses under the sustained weight of her own lies, and the officer feels sorry for her after her outburst, sending her home. He continues the investigation with a vengeance since the African-American dockworkers are threatening to organize and strike, so hassling them for a rape charge offers a way to diffuse their activism and issue a reminder about the impenetrability of racial hierarchy. Green performed for the Theatre Union yet again in Maltz’s Black Pit as Joe Kovarsky’s wife, Iola, who is little more than a tentative onlooker during the play, especially after Joe returns from prison. While Iola may have been mostly silent, Green’s role was physically groundbreaking as her character was the first actress to have a pregnant silhouette on the stage, a breakthrough that wouldn’t be widely reproduced for years in theatre or film (Maltz Retrospect 280). Maltz fought for the materiality of Iola’s pregnancy; after all, her pregnancy helps Joe self-justify his 222 betrayal and giving in as a stool pigeon. The willingness to show pregnancy as a physical condition offered yet another point of deviation from the status quo for the Theatre Union, this time in stage-sanctioned representations of a woman’s body. None of the reviews note this oddity, suggesting audiences were quick to adjust to, adapt, and accept on stage the physical changes of pregnancy that they observed in real life. While the role of Rose is the smallest of Green’s three roles in terms of number of lines, Green undoubtedly selected Peace on Earth from her Theatre Union, and more broadly, professional career docket, since it was the role that gave her the most power as she jumped to the front of the line, eager to lead, attack, and gain retribution for her brother’s unnecessary death. In the April 1937 issue of New Theatre & Film, a mainstay magazine for social problem-oriented, leftist theatre and film, the editors revised their Shifting Scenes section from chronicles of current social plays in production to short articles about current theatre debates. The first page of the newly recast forum had two pieces summarizing recent speeches by Albert Maltz and John Howard Lawson, which independently cross-pollinated in content. In addressing Philadelphia’s New Theatre, Lawson speaks of a disconnect between the aspirations and rhetoric of social theatre and the persisting reality that it’s still not firmly rooted in workers’ lives, suggesting a realization about the inadequacy of his own Marching Song. Despite professional authorship, Marching Song was dramatically dismal in its pessimistic portrayal of an auto strike in comparison to the autoworkers’ situational creativity and actual success in Flint as well as Titus’ wildly successful living newspaper style Sit-Down!, which 223 drew from striker interviews and opened the same month the New Theatre article was published. The other piece traces Maltz speaking to the Contemporary Theatre of Detroit, a group that performed for the Flint sit-downers and then circuited to perform at other strike sites. At the time of his speech, the Theatre Union was on the decline, centripetally moving towards its bankruptcy and dissolution, which Maltz was undoubtedly aware of. Similarly to Lawson, Maltz decries the tendency of labor theatre to seek middle class audiences instead of seeking a base in the labor movement. More significantly in terms of relevance to other professional workers’ theatres, Maltz accurately notes the reliance on full-length productions means one or two unsuccessful plays can jeopardize a theatre’s continued existence (Shifting Scenes 38). Even though the Theatre Union never had a horribly unsuccessful play, they also only had one runaway success, and Stevedore didn’t indefinitely sustain them, especially since the average cost to raise the curtain for a new show was $7,000 (Maltz Retrospect 241). As a solution, Maltz advocates for a mobile theatre, much like Brookwood’s Labor Chautauqua or the Detroit Contemporary Theatre group he’s addressing, which has the dual advantages of reducing overhead and more easily reaching working class audiences. Even though the Theatre Union reached tens of thousands of viewers, their fixed New York City location was a geographic limitation in terms of a wider audience attraction, and retrospectively, Maltz’s speech becomes a musing on the Theatre Union’s descent into financial insolvency. Without discriminating between professional and amateur dramatic content, Hyman defines good workers’ theatre as “optimistic and imbued with a sense of 224 possibility in working for social justice” (5). Compared to worker-generated content, professional workers’ theatre was consistently darker in both vision and action with a consistent reliance on death as a narrative drive. This is not to say strikes were not ever tragically marked or sparked by death, but the repeated emphasis on murder perpetuated a false truth that already had cultural valence and gave workers little credit for being able to initiate change. Workers were clearly personally vested in the outcomes of the struggles that directly affected them. Worker-generated drama gave them a chance to build and communicate the world they wanted or were striking to create, one of intelligent collectivism that generated optimism and improved justice, making the collective singing of “Solidarity” not a hackneyed ending for worker- generated plays but a proud synecdoche for a shared conscious. The lyrics in “Solidarity Forever” of “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun…the union makes us strong” bespoke an empowering vision made material by the play that cradled the song, and that play proved to elude professional authorship. 225 Bibliography Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Atkinson, Brooks. “‘Black Pit,’ Being Albert Maltz’s Drama of Coal Miners in West Virginia.” Rev. of Black Pit, by Albert Maltz. Theatre Union, New York. The New York Times 21 March 1935: F26. Altenbaugh, Richard J. Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. ---. “Proletarian Drama: An Educational Tool of the American Labor College Movement” Theatre Journal 34 (1982): 197-210. Bein, Albert. Let Freedom Ring. New York: Samuel French, 1936. Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York UP, 1971. Block, Albert M. Letter to Brookwood Labor Players. 14 April 1937. Box 98, Folder 8. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Brigadier, Emma. “Marching Women.” The Flint Auto Worker 6 February 1937: 2. Brookwood 1935 log. 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Chaplin, Charles, dir. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1936. Chaplin, Ralph. “Solidarity Forever.” 1914-15. Cohen-Cruz, Jan, ed. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. London: Routledge, 1998. Crosby, Bing. “I Found a Million Dollar Baby.” By Mort Dixon, Harry Warren, and Billy Rose. On the Sentimental Side. Brunswick and Decca, 1931. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Dollinger, Genora. Interview with Jack W. Skeels. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Dollinger, Sol and Genora Johnson Dollinger. Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers’ Union. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Dubofsky, Melvyn and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: A Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. Elam Jr., Harry J. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. England, Elizabeth. Letter to Erwin Shaw. 21 March 1936. Box 96, Folder 12. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. ---. Letter to Friends. 10 March 1936. Box 10, Folder 19. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. ---. Letter to Tucker P. Smith. 4 April 1936. Box 51, Folder 14. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. ---. “Notes on Speeches and Discussions.” Workers’ Theatre Conference. Brookwood Labor College, Katonah, New York. 29 March 1936. 227 Entertainment Committee of The F.W. Woolworth Strikers and Edith Segal of the Central Labor Body AFL Entertainment Committee for Sit-Down Strikers. Million Dollar Babies Sit Down: A Musical Skit in Ten Scenes. Unpublished play, March 1937. Paul Sporn Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Fall River International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Sit Down Sister! Unpublished play, June 1937. Paul Sporn Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Fine, Sidney. Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969. Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-41. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Fuoss, Kirk W. Striking Performances/Performing Strikes. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1997. Gardner, Joel. Interview preface. The Citizen Writer in Retrospect. Los Angeles: UCLA Oral History Program, 1983. Gazan, Max. Letter. Auto Women Advance April 1937: 3. Genora and Sol Dollinger Collection, Box 4, Folder 4, ts. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Gold, Mike. “Go Left, Young Writers!” American Working-Class Literature. Ed. Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 381-83. Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Green, Barbara. Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938. New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1997. Herbst, Josephine. The Executioner Waits. 1934. New York: Warner Books, 1985. ---. Pity Is Not Enough. 1933. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998. ---. Rope of Gold. 1939. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1984. 228 Hoffman, Claude E. Sit-Down in Anderson: UAW Local 663 Anderson, Indiana. Detroit, Wayne State UP, 1968. Hoke-Miller, Floyd. “Were You There? A Saga of the Flint Sit Down.” Genora and Sol Dollinger Collection, Box 2, Folder 28, ts. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Hyman, Colette A. Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor Movement. Critical Perspectives on the Past. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997. Kraus, Henry. The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers. 1947. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. Laird, Holly A. Women Coauthors. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Lawson, John Howard. The Hidden Heritage: A Rediscovery of the Ideas and Forces that Link the Thought of Our Time with the Culture of the Past. New York: Citadel Press, 1950. ---. Marching Song. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1937. LeSueur, Meridel. The Girl. 1939. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1999. Levine, Esther and George Nordstrom. Model 7A: A play in 4 scenes, portraying the situation in the automobile industry, in the spring of 1935. Katonah: Brookwood Labor Publication, 1935. Lorio, Dorothy. Letter to Mickey Harris. 6 March 1937. Box 97, Folder 19. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. ---. Letter to Tucker P. Smith. 9 April 1937. Box 96, Folder 30. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Maltz, Albert. Black Pit. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935. ---. The Citizen Writer. New York: International Publishers, 1950. ---. Interview with Joel Gardner. The Citizen Writer in Retrospect. Los Angeles: UCLA Oral History Program, 1983. ---. “Marching Song: Flint, Michigan and Brimmerton, U.S.A.” New Theatre & Film March 1937: 13+. 229 ---. “Ronald Reagan and Albert Maltz, Testimony before HUAC, 1947.” 20 August 2009. <http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/108/110880/ch26_a5_d1.pdf>. ---. The Underground Stream. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1940. ---. The Way Things Are and Other Stories. New York: International Publishers, 1938. ---. “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” New Masses 12 February 1946: 19-22. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1872. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. McDermott, Douglas. “The Theatre Nobody Knows: Workers’ Theatre in America, 1926-42.” Theatre Survey 6 (1965): 65-82. McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times Books, 1993. McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. Mortimer, Wyndham. Organize! My Life as a Union Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Mosher, John. “Modernized Times.” Rev. of Modern Times, dir. Charles Chaplin. The New Yorker 15 Feb. 1936: 57-58. Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge, 2001. Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty. 1935. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Ogden, Jess and Jean Carter. The Play Book: An Elementary Book on Stage Technique with Nine Plays of Various Types and Some Suggestions for Creative Use of Plays and Playing. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938. O’Rourke, Francis. “Diary of a Sitdowner.” 7 Nov. 2007 <http://community- 2.webtv.net/uhhuhdotcom/diaryofasitdowner/page5.html>. Pastan, Amy. Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals. London: Scala Publishers, 2006. 230 Pesotta, Rose. Bread Upon the Waters. 1944. 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Performance Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. Schickel, Richard, ed. The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. “Shifting Scenes.” New Theatre & Film March 1937: 38. Simons, Bud. Notebook. Bud and Hazel Simons Collection, Box 1, Folder: Notes on 1937 Sit-down Strike. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. Ed. Clare Virginia Eby. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. Sklar, George and Albert Maltz. Peace on Earth: An Anti-War Play. New York: Samuel French, 1934. 231 Shulman, Robert. The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. “Sit-Strike Play Given.” Unnamed Boston newspaper. 11 April 1937 clipping, ts. Box 96, Folder 13. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State U, Detroit. Smith, Tucker P. Letter to Albert M. Block. 19 April 1937. Box 98, Folder 8. Brookwood Collection. Walter P. 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Zandy, Janet. Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Zinn, Howard, Dana Frank, and Robin D.G. Kelley. Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator Raymond, Tiffany Knight (author)

Core Title Labor, performance, and theatre: Strike culture and the emergence of organized labor in the 1930's

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/22/2009

Defense Date 10/28/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1930s,Brookwood,Flint,Great Depression,labor college,labor theatre,Michigan,OAI-PMH Harvest,sit down strike,sit-down strike,UAW,women and strikes,workers theatre,workers' theatre,working class studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Roman, David (committee chair), Boone, Joseph Allen (committee member), Cheng, Meiling (committee member)

Creator Email tiffanyknight1@yahoo.com,tiffanyraymond@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2757

Unique identifier UC1198316

Identifier etd-Raymond-3372 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-282278 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2757 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Raymond-3372.pdf

Dmrecord 282278

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Raymond, Tiffany Knight

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu